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Module 5: Technical Basics

Technical SEO sounds intimidating, but for most small sites it's a short checklist, not a career. Fix the big wins — speed, mobile, and making sure Google can actually read your site — and you're done. You don't need to become a developer.

mobile score to aim for

2.5 sec

LCP target — largest contentful paint

sitemap to submit in Search Console

Site speed — measuring and fixing the big wins

Speed is a confirmed ranking factor, and more importantly, slow pages lose visitors — roughly speaking, each extra second of load time costs you a noticeable share of them. Start by measuring: run your homepage and one key service page through Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool and write down the mobile score. Don't panic at the number; you're looking for the specific recommendations underneath it. For most small sites, the fixes that matter fit on one hand.

Watch out

1. Compress your images. This is the #1 speed win on typical small business sites. Photos straight from a phone or camera are often 2–5 MB; resize them to the display size (rarely more than 1600px wide) and compress them — free tools get most images under 200 KB with no visible difference. 2. Remove what you don't use. Every plugin, widget, chat bubble, and tracking script adds load time. Audit yours: if you installed three slider plugins and use none, delete them. 3. Turn on caching so repeat visitors load pages from their browser instead of your server — most hosts offer this in one click. 4. Use decent hosting: the cheapest shared plan is often the bottleneck, and moving up one tier is the best dollars-to-speed trade you'll find. Aim for the largest contentful paint under about 2.5 seconds on mobile. One warning: don't chase a perfect 100 score — the difference between 85 and 100 is invisible to visitors and rarely worth the hours. Fix the big wins, verify the improvement, and move on to content.

Common mistake

Obsessing over a 95 PageSpeed score while the site has thin, unhelpful content. Speed is a tiebreaker, not the game — a fast empty page still ranks nowhere. Get the content right first, then chase the score.

Your path

Compress your images
The #1 speed win — get most images under 200 KB with no visible difference.
Remove what you don't use
Every unused plugin, widget, and tracking script adds load time.
Turn on caching
Repeat visitors load pages from their browser instead of your server.
Use decent hosting
The cheapest shared plan is often the bottleneck.

Build brief

Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights right now. What's your mobile score, and what's the top recommendation it gives you?

Mobile-friendliness

Text too small to read without pinching to zoom — body text should be at least 16px. Buttons and links too close together — tap targets need room, roughly 48px minimum, so visitors stop tapping the wrong thing. Horizontal scrolling — if the page slides sideways, something (usually an image or table) is wider than the screen; fix the width. Popups covering the content on load — Google specifically penalizes intrusive popups on mobile, so delay yours or shrink them. Forms that fight you — tiny fields, no input types (phone keyboards should appear for phone fields), required fields that shouldn't be. Google's free mobile-friendly test will flag the technical issues, but the thumb test catches the real ones. Fix what you find, then re-test on a real device — emulators miss things like sticky headers eating half the screen.

Build brief

Try completing your site's main action — call, book, or buy — on your phone using one thumb. What broke, annoyed you, or felt too small?

Sitemaps, robots.txt, and Search Console setup

Three pieces of infrastructure make sure Google can find and understand your site. Set them up once, check them occasionally, and they'll quietly do their job. 1. Google Search Console: this free tool is your direct line to Google — it shows which queries bring you traffic, which pages are indexed, and what errors Google hits on your site. Verify ownership (usually by adding a small DNS record or HTML tag your host or site builder walks you through), then leave it collecting data. Everything in Module 6's measurement lesson runs on this tool. 2. XML sitemap: a simple file listing all your important pages, which helps Google discover them — especially new or deeply buried ones. Most site builders and SEO plugins generate one automatically at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml; check that it exists, then submit its URL in Search Console under Sitemaps.

Build brief

Is your site verified in Google Search Console yet? If not, what specifically is blocking you?

Steal this template

Technical SEO checklist:

☐ Mobile-friendly test passed
☐ PageSpeed mobile 50+ (80+ ideal)
☐ SSL active sitewide
☐ Sitemap submitted in Search Console
☐ robots.txt not blocking anything important
☐ No 404s on key pages (check Coverage report)

In the next 24 hours

Run PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages. Write down the scores — then fix only the single biggest issue (usually one oversized image).

PageSpeed Insights gives your site a mobile score of 62, and the top recommendation is "serve images in next-gen formats / properly size images." What's the sensible move?

Organic traffic value estimator

Play with the numbers — everything updates live.

Monthly organic visitors Conversion rate (percent) Average sale ($)

Conversions per month:0

Estimated monthly revenue:0