Module 5: Technical SEO Essentials
Technical SEO ensures Google can find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. Poor technical foundations silently kill rankings regardless of content quality.
- Core Web Vitals are confirmed ranking signals — poor scores suppress rankings even with excellent content.
- LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1 — these are your performance targets.
- FAQ schema improves AI Overview citation rates by 30-40%. Schema is now both an SEO and GEO tool.
- Block Googlebot in robots.txt = no indexing. Block GPTBot = no AI citations. Check both.
- Broken internal links (404s) waste crawl budget and lose ranking authority — audit monthly.
Core Web Vitals: Google's UX Ranking Signals
Target: Under 2.5 seconds
Fixes: Compress images to WebP, use CDN, optimise server response, preload key resources
Target: Under 200 milliseconds
Fixes: Reduce JavaScript execution, split large tasks, defer non-critical scripts
Target: Under 0.1
Fixes: Set explicit dimensions on images/videos, avoid inserting content above existing content
- GSC → Core Web Vitals report → check mobile AND desktop
- Note all "Poor" or "Needs Improvement" URLs
- Test each at pagespeed.web.dev
- Fix top 3 Diagnostics items for maximum impact
Quick Speed Wins
- Compress all images to WebP under 100KB
- Enable browser caching via .htaccess
- Use Cloudflare free CDN
- Defer non-critical JavaScript
Schema Markup: Your SEO and GEO Multiplier
Schema markup tells Google exactly what your content is about — and in 2026 it's also your most powerful GEO tool for appearing in AI-generated answers.
Priority Schema Types
Add to any page with Q&A content. Unlocks FAQ dropdowns in search results and boosts AI citation rates 30-40%. Add 4-7 questions with 2-4 sentence answers.
Add to all blog posts with datePublished and dateModified. Signals freshness to Google and AI systems.
Shows navigation path in results (Home > Blog > Article). Improves CTR and site structure understanding.
Essential for businesses with a physical location or service area.
- Use our AI SEO Prompt Generator to create FAQ schema
- Paste JSON-LD into a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag in page head
- Validate at search.google.com/test/rich-results
- Submit URL in GSC for re-crawling
Crawlability & Indexing
robots.txt for 2026
User-agent: Googlebot / Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot / Allow: / (ChatGPT)
User-agent: ClaudeBot / Allow: / (Anthropic)
User-agent: PerplexityBot / Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Blocking AI crawlers = your site cannot be cited in AI answers.
Common Issues to Fix
- 404 errors — GSC → Coverage → Not Found. Fix or redirect.
- Redirect chains — A → B → C should be A → C directly.
- Duplicate content — Fix with canonical tags.
- Orphan pages — Pages with no internal links. Add links from related content.
- GSC → Coverage — any new errors?
- GSC → Core Web Vitals — any new poor URLs?
- GSC → Performance — any traffic drops?
- Submit new pages via URL Inspection for faster indexing
You are a technical SEO engineer. I am seeing this issue on my site [YOUR URL]: [DESCRIBE THE SYMPTOM] Walk me through: 1. The 5 most likely causes, ranked by probability 2. Exactly how to diagnose each one (which tool, which report, what to look for) 3. The fix for each cause, with any code or config changes needed 4. How to verify the fix worked Assume I have access to Google Search Console and my site files. Be specific and practical.
Describe the symptom you are seeing (e.g. pages not indexing, slow load).
Click each item to mark complete — progress is saved.