Module 3: Technical SEO
Site speed, mobile-first, sitemaps, robots, and schema markup — the foundation work that lets everything else rank.
Speed is a ranking factor (and a conversion factor)
Google measures page experience with Core Web Vitals — three numbers in plain English: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page reacts when tapped, and whether things jump around while loading. Slow pages rank worse, and worse: they convert worse. Study after study shows each extra second of load time cuts conversions by a meaningful chunk. Speed is not a technical nicety; it is money.
The usual culprits on small business sites are embarrassingly fixable. Oversized images are number one — a 4MB hero photo that could be 200KB with no visible difference. Next: too many plugins and scripts loading on every page, cheap shared hosting, and no caching. Run Google's free PageSpeed Insights on your homepage right now; it hands you the prioritized fix list.
The 80/20 of speed work: compress every image before uploading (aim under 200KB), enable lazy loading so below-the-fold images wait their turn, turn on caching, and remove plugins you do not use. A two-second page beats a six-second page in rankings AND in revenue — fix speed before you write another word. Test on your phone over a normal connection, not office wifi. Your customers are on phones.
Every second costs
Load time vs conversions
Example for illustration — not real results. The lesson: each extra second cuts conversions by a meaningful chunk.
Build brief
Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and your top service page. Write down the mobile score for each and the top 3 fixes it recommends. Circle the image files over 500KB — those get compressed this week.
Saved
Help the crawler help you
Your robots.txt is a small text file telling crawlers where they may and may not go. The default should be permissive — block only what wastes crawl budget: admin pages, internal search results, thank-you pages. The classic disaster is a staging-site “disallow everything” that ships to production and de-blocks nothing. Check yours today: yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
Your XML sitemap is the inventory list you hand Google: every page you want indexed, nothing you don't. Submit it in Search Console and keep it clean — no broken links, no noindexed pages, no 404s. A dirty sitemap teaches Google to distrust your signals. Most site platforms generate one automatically; your job is submitting it and pruning it.
Then the quiet work: canonical tags on every page pointing to the one true URL (kills duplicate-content confusion), noindex on thin utility pages (tag archives, author pages with one post), and 301 redirects from every old or dead URL to its replacement — never leave broken links for crawlers or visitors. Crawl budget is real: every wasted crawl on junk is a crawl stolen from a page that earns you money.
Build brief
Checklist audit: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt (anything wrongly blocked?), confirm your sitemap is submitted in Search Console, and list 5 URLs that should 301-redirect or be noindexed. Write the fix for each.
Saved
Schema markup: the easy wins
Schema markup is code that tells Google exactly what your page is — not in prose it has to interpret, but in labels it cannot misread. “This is a local business. These are its hours. This is its phone number. These are its reviews.” The format is called JSON-LD, and you paste it into your page once. Most site platforms have plugins or built-in fields for it.
Why bother? Schema powers rich results — the extras in search results like star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, and business info panels. Rich results take up more space and earn more clicks at the same ranking. A plumber with review stars and an FAQ dropdown next to a plain blue link wins the click most of the time. Same position, more traffic.
The easy wins for a small business: LocalBusiness schema on your homepage and contact page (name, address, phone, hours, area served), FAQPage schema on your FAQ sections, and Article schema on blog posts. One afternoon of work, permanent click advantage. Schema doesn't directly boost rankings — it boosts everything around the ranking: visibility, clicks, and trust. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test before you call it done.
Speak Google’s language
Plain result vs rich result
| No schema | With schema | |
|---|---|---|
| What Google sees | prose it must interpret | labels it cannot misread |
| In the results | a plain blue link | hours, reviews, phone shown |
| Setup | hoping it understands | paste JSON-LD once |
Build brief
List which schema types apply to your site (LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Article, Product…). For each page that qualifies, write down what fields you'd fill in: name, hours, phone, area served, FAQs. Note which pages already have schema and which need it added.
Saved
The speed fix priority list
Dev's site loads in 7 seconds on mobile. His content is excellent and he has good backlinks, but rankings are slipping. PageSpeed flags 5MB of uncompressed images and 12 unused plugins. What's the move?
Your turn: Technical audit sheet: for your homepage + 3 key pages record mobile PageSpeed score, largest image size, schema present (y/n), canonical correct (y/n). Then list your top 5 fixes in priority order.
Saved.
Your next 24 hours
Compress the 5 largest images on your site, enable lazy loading, and check your robots.txt. Submit (or re-submit) your sitemap in Search Console.
Steal this template
TECHNICAL SEO CHECKLIST
Mobile PageSpeed: ___ / Largest image: ___KB
Robots.txt clean: ☐ Sitemap submitted: ☐ Canonicals set: ☐
Schema added: LocalBusiness ☐ FAQ ☐ Article ☐
Validated with Rich Results Test: ☐
Cheat sheet
- Core Web Vitals: load speed, responsiveness, visual stability. Slow pages rank and convert worse.
- Images under 200KB, lazy loading on, caching enabled, unused plugins removed.
- Robots.txt blocks only junk — never CSS/JS, never the whole site by accident.
- Clean sitemap submitted in Search Console: indexed pages only, no 404s.
- Canonical tags kill duplicate-content confusion. 301 old URLs; noindex thin utility pages.
- Schema (LocalBusiness, FAQ, Article) wins rich results — more space, more clicks. Validate it.