Technical SEO is often misunderstood. It’s not about installing plugins or ticking boxes.
It’s about ensuring your website can be properly crawled, indexed, and understood — while delivering a fast, efficient user experience.
Here’s what actually matters.
1. Site Structure
Search engines rely on structure to understand your site.
This includes:
- Clean URL hierarchy
- Logical page grouping
- Internal linking
A messy structure leads to poor indexation and weaker rankings.
2. Crawl Efficiency
Search engines have limited resources to crawl your site.
Poor setups waste that budget on:
- Duplicate pages
- Parameter URLs
- Unnecessary archives
Optimising crawl paths improves visibility.
3. Page Speed & Core Web Vitals
Performance is now directly tied to rankings. In fact, Google has been giving preference to these metric for the last few years now. Underperforming websites still do get traffic, but rank lower than that of their competitors who has mastered this.
Key factors to consider are:
- Load time
- Interactivity
- Visual stability
We often do the following test: how fast if the website on our mobile devices when we are not connected to the company Wifi.
Yes, we test it on 4G, LTE of 5G connections via Vodacom, MTN and Telkom to see how a real user would experience the speed of the website. WordPress sites often struggle here due to poor builds.
4. Indexation Control
Not every page should be indexed. You need to understand your content and what carries value.
You need control over:
- Noindex pages
- Canonical URLs
- Duplicate content
Without this, search engines get confused.
Have you ever gone to the Pretoria Regional Court and try to find which court you need to go to? It is a mess, and you end up asking 10 people on the way who are too busy to assist.
You end up walking around for 15 minutes before actually getting to the court and then you sit and wait. The goal of a search engine is to get you there as quick as possible, but it can't do that if it doesn't understand your website and content.
This leads us to our next point.
5. Proper Use of Schema
Structured data helps search engines understand your content better.
It enhances:
- Search visibility
- Rich results
- Click-through rates
But only when implemented correctly!
6. Technical Implementation vs Plugins
Plugins like Rank Math or Yoast are tools — not solutions.
They don’t, fix site structure, improve speed or handle complex indexation issues. Real SEO happens in the build and backend.
As a rule at TapAway we only make use of RankMath. It is a very powerful plugin that assist with the majority of these issues and also helps us to an extend to identify problems. Yoast is what we consider bloated. Once again, if you do not understand the underlying requirements, then the plugin doesn't help much.
What does this all mean?
Technical SEO is just part of the process to ensuring that you have a competitive advantage online and that your content is discoverable by search engines.
Beyond that you still have your content strategy to consider, your social marketing and your Google Advertising. The key here is to get the foundation right and give your website a better change at getting visitors.