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SEO

Technical SEO foundations every business website needs

Author
Lumna Team
Published
2 min read

M ost SEO conversations start with keywords and content. Those matter, but they only pay off when search engines can reach, render and understand every important page on your site. Technical SEO is the groundwork that makes everything else count, and it is usually the fastest place to find quick wins.

1. Make sure the right pages can be crawled and indexed

Start with Google Search Console. The Pages report shows which URLs are indexed and why others are not. Look for important pages excluded by a stray noindex tag, blocked in robots.txt, or treated as duplicates because the canonical tag points somewhere else. Your XML sitemap should list only canonical, indexable URLs that return a 200 status.

2. Keep the site structure shallow and logical

Every key page should be reachable within a few clicks of the homepage, through plain HTML links rather than scripts or search boxes. Group related pages together, use descriptive URLs and link between closely related topics. Clear structure helps visitors and gives search engines strong signals about which pages matter most.

3. Treat speed and Core Web Vitals as part of SEO

Google measures real-user experience through Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint for loading, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability. Compress and correctly size images, serve modern formats such as WebP, limit third-party scripts and reserve space for anything that loads late.

4. Add structured data where it genuinely applies

Schema markup describes your organisation, services, articles, products or FAQs in a form machines can read. It does not guarantee rich results, but accurate structured data reduces ambiguity. Only mark up content that is visible on the page, and validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test.

5. Handle international and multilingual pages properly

If you serve more than one language or country, use hreflang annotations so each audience is shown the right version, and make sure every alternate page links back. Keep one canonical URL per language rather than translating on the fly.

Fix the foundations first. Content and links compound much faster on a site that search engines can crawl and trust. - Lumna

A technical audit is rarely glamorous, but it is where most sites gain the most for the least effort. Once the foundations are sound, content and authority-building can do their job properly.

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Lumna Team

Lumna is a London digital agency working across SEO, web design, social media, advertising, apps and analytics. We write about what we learn on client work so you can apply it to your own brand.

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