Tammivaara Digital Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t only about keywords and content (whilst they are a vital part of it). SEO also includes the technical foundation of your website. This is what we call technical SEO.

If your site has broken links, loads slowly, or isn’t mobile-friendly, no amount of good content will help you rank. That’s where technical SEO comes in.

In this post, we’ll explain what technical SEO is, why it matters for visibility on Google and other search engines, and give you a clear checklist to get started😉 .

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO means the behind-the-scenes elements of your website that help search engines crawl, index, and understand what your content is all about.

It can be thought as the infrastructure of your site, and it should be fast, secure, structured, and error-free.

Why is Technical SEO Important?

Even the best blog post or product page won’t show up in search results if:

• Google can’t crawl the page
• The site takes too long to load
• Your content isn’t structured correctly
• You have duplicate content or broken links
• The site doesn’t work well on mobile

Technical SEO allows your content to compete fairly in search results. Without it, even perfect content just won’t rank.

Common Technical SEO Elements

The core parts of technical SEO are:

• Website speed (page load time)
• Mobile-friendliness
• Secure connection (HTTPS)
• Proper URL structure
• XML sitemap
• Robots.txt file
• Canonical tags
• Clean internal linking
• Structured data (schema markup)
• Fixing broken links and redirects

Technical SEO Checklist (Basic)

Here’s a beginner-friendly checklist to help you review and improve your technical SEO setup:

Speed & performance

• Compress images (WebP preferred) with tools like TinyPNG
• Use browser caching and minify scripts. In WordPress you can do this with plugins like WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache tai Autoptimize.
• Use a fast hosting provider
• Test your site with for example Google PageSpeed Insights.

Mobile-friendliness

• Use responsive design. This means that your website automatically adjusts its layout and elements to look and work properly on all screen size
• Test on multiple different mobile devices

Secure connection

• Make sure your site uses HTTPS (SSL certificate installed)
• Redirect HTTP to HTTPS version

Indexing & crawlability

• Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
• Check your robots.txt file for errors
• Avoid “noindex” on important pages

Clean URLs & site structure

• Use simple, readable URLs (e.g. /services/seo instead of /?id=123)
• Include internal links between related pages
• Add breadcrumbs if your site has deep structure

Structured data

• Use schema markup where relevant (products, articles, local business)
• Test with Google’s Rich Results Test

Fix errors

• Remove or redirect broken links
• Use canonical tags to prevent duplicate content
• Regularly check your site in Google Search Console

Technical SEO Supports Your Content SEO

Technical SEO doesn’t replace your keyword strategy — it supports it. Once the structure is solid, your blogs, service pages, and product descriptions have a much better chance of ranking on search engines.

Need Help with SEO?

I offer hands-on SEO help for websites targeting the Finnish market — from technical SEO basics to keyword research and content optimization.
👉 Check out my Finnish SEO services or contact me here.