Technical SEO fundamentals: site structure, speed, and audits

Executive overview

Most technical SEO problems fall into three categories: poor site structure, slow pages, and unmonitored errors. Fix these and search engines can crawl, index, and rank your site without friction.

A free weekly site audit catches 95% of the issues that will silently damage your rankings.

Site structure and internal links

• Organise pages as a logical hierarchy: homepage → main topics → sub-pages.
• Internal links signal relationships between pages and help search engines crawl efficiently.
• Structure becomes critical as you scale — blog posts, category pages, and product pages add complexity fast.

Page speed basics

• Page speed has been a desktop ranking factor since 2010; mobile since 2018.
• Google's speed update targets only the slowest pages — no need to obsess over milliseconds.
• Enable caching through your hosting provider to serve content faster.
• Compress images (e.g. ShortPixel) to reduce file sizes and load times.

Running site audits

• Common technical errors: broken pages with internal links pointing to them, orphan pages (no incoming links), duplicate content, redirect chains.
• Don't try to memorise 50+ potential issues — run scheduled audits and fix what surfaces.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free) crawls up to 10,000 pages per site.
• Set up weekly scheduled audits; enable crawl of external links to catch broken outgoing URLs.
• The Overview Report shows a health score plus top issues with affected URL counts.
• For each issue: read the description, see the fix snippet, click through to affected URLs, fix one by one.