Most small businesses ignore the technical side of SEO because it feels complicated. You know your website should be faster, cleaner and easier for Google to understand, but you are not sure what any of that actually means. As a result, your site works against you without you realising it.
Technical SEO is not about code or complex tools. It’s about making sure your website can be crawled, indexed and understood. When the technical foundations are right, every other part of your SEO starts working better.
This guide breaks down technical SEO in plain English and shows you the simple steps that make the biggest difference.
Think of your website like a shop. You’ve done the signage (your keyword research), arranged the displays (your content, including your on-page SEO), and even attracted footfall (your visitors). But if the door sticks, the lights flicker, or half the shelves are blocked off, people won’t stay long. That’s what poor technical SEO looks like. It’s the unseen friction that stops your site performing.
Technical SEO ensures:
Get those things right, and everything else - content, backlinks, keywords - starts to deliver better results.
Related reading: How search engines work
Search engines use bots (called crawlers) to find and understand your pages. If your site blocks them or hides key content behind messy code or dead links, you’ll struggle to rank.
You don’t need to understand how crawling works, you just need to make it easy for them.
If Google can’t find a page, it won’t index it. And if it’s not indexed, it can’t rank.
Page speed matters more than most people realise. Slow websites frustrate users, increase bounce rates, and lower conversions. Google measures this too, and uses it as a ranking factor.
You don’t need a developer to make improvements:
Even shaving a second or two off a page load time can make a noticeable difference to engagement and rankings.
Most people visit small business websites on their phones. If yours isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re instantly losing traffic.
Responsive design should be the baseline, your site should automatically resize and adapt to fit any screen. Test your pages using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see how they perform.
If visitors have to pinch, zoom, or scroll sideways, they’ll leave. Google sees that behaviour too.
A clear structure tells both users and search engines what matters most.
Every page should have a place and purpose — no dead ends, no confusing detours.
Keep your structure simple:
Home → Main category → Subcategory → Individual page
From an SEO perspective, that hierarchy helps distribute authority and makes sure your important pages get seen. From a user perspective, it just feels natural to navigate.
SEO works best when your site has a clean structure. If you want the full breakdown, take a look at our SEO for small businesses resource hub, which covers technical SEO, keywords and content.
Modern users expect security. If your site still runs on HTTP instead of HTTPS, browsers will flag it as “Not secure”. That instantly damages trust.
Move to HTTPS using a free SSL certificate from your hosting provider. Also, keep your CMS, plugins, and themes up to date, out-of-date software is a common cause of site slowdowns and hacking issues.
Big brands have the budget to fix technical issues fast. Small businesses often don’t. But here’s the upside: when you get the basics right, you can easily compete - because so many small sites ignore them.
You don’t need to be an SEO technician. You just need to make sure your website is crawlable, fast, mobile-friendly, secure and well-structured.
Do that, and Google will understand it. Visitors will trust it. And your content will finally have the platform it deserves.
Next up: Advanced SEO strategies for small businesses →
If you’d like to learn how to use SEO to grow your business (without the jargon), check out more of our SEO for small businesses resources. We explain how to choose keywords, create great content and track your progress, all in language that makes sense.