Edip Kilinc is the founder of Webwavers. Together with his team, he develops websites, brands, and digital presences for ambitious companies – with over 250 completed projects, and honored with awards including the German Design Award 2026.
Technical SEO answers three questions: Can a search engine reach the page? Can it read the content? Can it index it?
Nothing more. It does not make bad text good, and it does not make a missing page visible. It ensures that existing content gets its chance.
That is why the order is important: First, make sure there is something to be found, then make sure it is found. A technically flawless website with three pages ranks for three topics.
Conversely, however: A technical error can make good content completely invisible. An accidentally set noindex directive removes a page entirely from the index, regardless of how good it is. This makes technical SEO a prerequisite, not a lever.
Technical SEO answers three questions: Can a search engine reach the page? Can it read the content? Can it index it?
Nothing more. It does not make bad text good, and it does not make a missing page visible. It ensures that existing content gets its chance.
That is why the order is important: First, make sure there is something to be found, then make sure it is found. A technically flawless website with three pages ranks for three topics.
Conversely, however: A technical error can make good content completely invisible. An accidentally set noindex directive removes a page entirely from the index, regardless of how good it is. This makes technical SEO a prerequisite, not a lever.
1. Indexability. Every page that is intended to be found must not carry a noindex and must not be blocked in the robots.txt. Check: Search Console, Page Indexing Report.
2. Sitemap. An XML sitemap that contains all relevant pages and no redirects or blocked URLs. Submitted in the Search Console.
3. Title and Description. Unique per page. Title under 60 characters with the main keyword at the front, description 120 to 160 characters.
4. Heading Structure. Exactly one H1 per page, below that H2 for the sections. No heading used as a design element.
5. Loading Time. Especially Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on mobile. The most common bottleneck is overly large images.
6. Structured Data. JSON-LD for Organization, Article, and BreadcrumbList. This tells machines what a piece of content is.
Anyone who has these six clean is technically ahead of the vast majority of competitors.
The most consequential technical error does not appear as an error in any standard report: content that is only generated in the browser via JavaScript.
Everything looks correct in the browser. In the delivered HTML, there is nothing in that spot. Search engines can partially compensate for this because they render pages – with a delay and not always completely. The retrieval tools of generative systems usually do not do it at all.
Typically affected are expandable areas, tabs, post-loaded lists, and everything that comes from a CMS via an interface.
The test takes ten seconds: open the page, view the source code, and use the search function to look for a sentence from the middle of the text. If it is not found, the content is not in the document.
Anyone who wants to check an entire website retrieves it without JavaScript and compares the amount of text. The difference is usually significant.
Of the Core Web Vitals, one is crucial in everyday life: Largest Contentful Paint, the time until the largest visible element is loaded. Target value is under 2.5 seconds on mobile devices.
In over half of the cases, the cause lies within the images. Three measures have an immediate effect:
Format. WebP instead of JPEG or PNG typically saves 30 to 50 percent with the same quality.
Size. An image displayed at 600 pixels wide does not need to be delivered at 3,000 pixels wide. This is the most common and expensive mistake.
Loading behavior. Only load everything below the fold (visible area) when it is needed. In contrast, load the main image at the top with high priority, not delayed.
After that come fonts – limit the number of font weights, deliver them locally – and external scripts. Every tool loaded in the header delays everything that follows.
Cumulative Layout Shift is the second metric that matters and is easy to fix: specify width and height on every image so that nothing jumps.
Many auditing tools show an overall score. A score of 100 with zero errors feels complete – and regularly hides the more important findings.
The reason: These tools categorize by technical severity, not by business impact. A missing H1 is a warning, not an error. A description that is too short is the same. Both can still mean that Google compiles the snippet itself and the click-through rate collapses.
That's why it's worth looking beneath the overall score:
How many indexable pages have no H1?
How many have a description that is too short or missing?
How many titles are longer than 60 characters?
How many pages have no internal links?
These are the numbers that say something about the condition. The overall score only says that nothing is broken.
Week 1 – Ensure visibility. Set up Search Console and check which pages are indexed. Submit sitemap. Fix incorrectly set noindex directives and robots.txt blocks. Without this step, nothing else after will work.
Week 2 – Readability. Run the HTML test for each page type. Where content is missing, clarify with development. This is the only point that can become technically complex.
Week 3 – Metadata and structure. Check titles and descriptions per page, check H1. This is diligent work, not specialized knowledge, and directly affects the click-through rate.
Week 4 – Loading time. Convert and shrink images, set dimensions, check scripts.
Week 5 – Structured data. Organization and WebSite centrally, Article and BreadcrumbList via the template.
After that, a quarterly check is sufficient. Technical SEO is not a permanent construction site – it is a state that you establish once and then maintain.
