Are you looking for ways to improve your website’s search engine rankings? Technical SEO makes your site visible to them. Google can’t crawl your pages properly, index your content, or rank you where you belong without it.
At Matter Solutions, we’ve spent over 20 years providing specialist technical SEO services for Brisbane businesses and clients across Australia. We know what breaks sites and how to fix them fast.
In this guide, we’ll cover:
- What technical SEO actually involves
- Common site speed problems that hold you back
- Indexing issues affecting Australian websites
- Practical fixes you can implement today
Ready to get your site working properly and strengthen your search engine optimisation? Let’s begin.
Contents
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO optimises your website’s backend so search engines can crawl, index, and rank your pages effectively. The improvement covers site speed, mobile performance, indexing rules, and the structural elements that allow Google to evaluate your site without any issue.
In other words, technical SEO removes the barriers between your website and search engines.
We’ll now explain more about how tech SEO works.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are Google’s important performance indicators that reflect how quickly a page loads, how stable it feels while rendering, and how promptly it reacts to someone’s first interaction.
Here’s a breakdown of each indicator:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The LCP metric points to the moment when the main part of the page, like a headline or hero image, appears etc. A strong LCP score means visitors see something useful right away.
- First Input Delay (FID): Visitors notice the FID metric the first time they tap or click something. If you have a low FID score, it means the site responds quickly, and people feel like the page listens to them straight away.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): A CLS score shows whether elements on your page stay in place while everything loads. A low score keeps the page steady, so visitors do not chase moving buttons or lose their spot while reading.
These three metrics together give you a clear picture of how your site treats visitors, and they point you toward the small fixes that can considerably improve your search engine performance.
Crawlability
What good is great content if Google can’t reach it or assess your website’s performance? Crawlability ensures Google can actually get through your site and see what you have to offer. When its bots follow your links, they try to understand your pages.
However, if your pages are blocked, you end up with crawlability issues, which destroy your ranking. It mainly happens due to a misconfigured robots.txt file or a stray noindex tag. They can hide whole sections without you noticing (we check this first in every audit for a reason).
Once you fix those roadblocks, Google finds your pages again and puts your content back in front of people.
Site Architecture
Good site architecture is the setup that helps people find what they need quickly, which makes your whole site feel easier to use. It also plays a huge role in technical SEO because it shows Google how your pages connect.
To demonstrate that you have an effective site architecture, you need to have a proper internal linking strategy. This is because when your links show how pages relate to each other, Google can see which pages are most important.
For instance, if your homepage leads to a key service page and that page points to related content, you guide authority to the places that deserve it.
Pro tip: Audit your orphan pages regularly. If a page has zero internal links pointing to it, Google can struggle to find it.
What Are Common Site Speed Issues?
According to Google on their Think with Google page, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, over half of mobile site visits drop off when a page takes longer than three seconds to load. And the most common issues behind weak website speed are slow page loads and poor mobile responsiveness.
How about we go through these issues together?
Slow Page Loads
Page speed affects where you rank, the organic traffic you earn, and how many visitors convert. Every extra second of load time costs you sales.
The problem usually comes down to massive images, messy code, or budget hosting. To solve these issues, you must compress your images, remove unnecessary scripts, and upgrade your hosting.
In our experience, faster sites keep people around longer, and Google notices it almost immediately. We’ve seen rankings jump within weeks just from skimming off two-second load times (it’s the simplest change with the biggest reward).
Mobile Responsiveness
Did you know that more than 60% of searches now happen on phones? So if your site feels difficult to visit on mobile, most people will bounce before they even see what you offer. Google picks up on this quickly, which is why mobile-friendly sites often get a boost in search results.
And if you’re curious how Google spots a poor mobile experience, it’s pretty simple. Tiny buttons, text that forces you to zoom in, or pages that slide sideways all tell Google something’s off, and it reduces your search visibility.
What Indexing Problems Affect Australian Websites?
Indexing problems occur when technical issues stop search engines from accessing, understanding, or storing your website’s pages. The issues include broken links, duplicate content, missing robots.txt files, and XML sitemap issues.
Here are these 4 main problems in detail:
- Broken Links: Nothing stops a visit faster than a link that leads to a 404 page. Google notices it too, so running quick checks regularly helps you fix dead links early and keep everyone moving through your site smoothly.
- Duplicate Content: If your site shows the same text on several pages, Google gets mixed signals about which page deserves attention. You can clear this up with simple steps like adding canonical tags or tidying your URL structure.
- Robots.txt Files: A robots.txt file tells Google where it can go on your site, and one small mistake can hide your best pages. Some sites even launch with an old test file that blocks everything. So it is always worth checking this file after big updates or site changes.
- XML Sitemaps: An XML sitemap acts like a guide that helps Google reach your key pages faster, especially on bigger sites. When you submit it through Google Search Console and update it after changes, Google can find new pages more easily and index them sooner.
From what we’ve seen, a clean setup in these areas gives your site an edge in overall SEO performance.
How Do You Fix Technical SEO Problems?
Now that you know the common issues, let’s talk about a practical technical SEO strategy to fix them. The process supports your wider digital marketing strategy and involves implementing structured data, switching to HTTPS, and choosing the right hosting setup for your target audience.
Consider the following fixes for your issues:
- Structured Data Markup: When you add structured data and similar technical SEO forms of markup, you make it much easier for Google to understand your pages. We recommend using schema for this purpose, since they can show reviews, prices, and opening hours right on the results page.
- HTTPS Security: What happens when visitors see a big “Not Secure” warning on your site? They usually leave right away, and Google pulls back too. But once you switch to HTTPS and update your links properly, your site feels safer, loads cleaner, and earns more trust.
- Australian Hosting: If you host your site in Australia, it speeds things up for local visitors because servers closer to home load pages faster. And using a .au domain also tells Google you serve Australian customers.
After you sort out these basics, your site will feel more trustworthy, and Google will have a much easier time understanding it.
Fix Technical SEO to Improve Rankings
You now know how important it is for search engines to find and crawl your site without running into problems, which directly strengthens your search rankings.
When you improve things like Core Web Vitals, broken links, duplicate content, robots.txt settings, and XML sitemaps, you give your site a much cleaner ground to grow. And when you switch to HTTPS and use Australian hosting, you make the whole experience faster and safer for your visitors.
If you want expert help from a dedicated technical SEO agency, we’re here for you. At Matter Solutions, we’ve been fixing these issues as part of our broader digital marketing services for Brisbane businesses since 2000.
Book a free call with us and find out how regular technical SEO audits keep your site healthy.
