A Comprehensive Guide to Technical SEO

SEO beginners will hear the same refrain over and over again: focus on the content. The story goes that the core of SEO is creating high-quality, uniquely valuable content, then getting other websites to link to it. 

While it’s true that content is essential to SEO, it’s not the be all and end all – you need to focus on technical SEO, too.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explain exactly what technical SEO is, and steps you can take right now to improve your site’s SEO. The tools and tactics we present here are inexpensive or free to implement – the biggest cost is the labour.

By the end, you’ll understand exactly why technical SEO is worth the effort, and how each change will improve your ranking on SERPs.

Let’s get started.

Table Of Contents

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a strategy composed of tactics used to help Google (and other search engines) crawl and index your pages. When your pages aren’t crawled or indexed, they won’t appear in search engine results.

Crawling and Indexing

Crawling and indexing are two distinct, but intimately linked activities conducted by search engines. These engines use bots to “crawl” the Web, following links from a given page to see how it connects to:

  • Other pages on the website (internal links)
  • Other pages around the Web (external links)

Indexing is an action search engines can take after they crawl a page, adding the page to their index (and making the page searchable). Not all pages that are crawled will be indexed, but all pages that have been indexed were crawled first.

Obviously, you want your pages popping up on SERPs, and for this to occur, any page that you want to appear must have been crawled and indexed first.

99% Invisible

At this point, some of your eyes might have glazed over – doesn’t focusing on the behaviour of robots detract from the user experience?

No. In fact, it’s the opposite.

I stole the title of this section from a podcast, “99% Invisible” – named so because good design goes largely unnoticed. It’s bad design that gets noticed, because, in some way, it obstructs you.

Search engines want your good design to go unnoticed – in other words, they want your users to have an unobstructed experience. When a web crawler (one term for the robots they use) has a bad experience, it’s likely that your users will have a bad experience too. Almost all of the tips we give here, from how to design your site structure to choosing the right URLs, improve user experience as well as crawling/indexing.

Google’s AI Overviews

The single most significant paradigm shift in search since its inception is here. Introduced in 2024, Google’s AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience or SGE) fundamentally change the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Instead of just providing a list of links, Google now often generates a direct, AI-powered answer at the very top of the page.

This is not just another feature; it’s a new “top of the page.” These AI snapshots can be massive. Sometimes over 1700 pixels tall, pushing the traditional #1 organic result far below the fold. For many informational queries, this will inevitably reduce clicks to websites, with some early studies predicting organic traffic drops of 20-60%.

In 2025, the goal of SEO is no longer simply to rank #1. The goal is to maintain visibility within this new, AI-driven landscape.

How to Adapt Your Strategy for an AI-Powered SERP

Your technical and content strategies must evolve to treat the AI Overview as both a threat and an opportunity.

  1. Optimize for Direct Answers & Citations The AI generating these overviews gets its information from existing web pages. You need to make your content a prime source. Structure your content to provide clear, concise, and factual answers to common questions. Think like you’re optimizing for a featured snippet, but with more depth.

    • Action: Use Q&A formats and implement FAQPage schema where appropriate. This makes it easy for algorithms to identify a direct question-and-answer pair on your page, increasing the chance your content will be used, and your site cited in an AI Overview.

  2. Double Down on Unique Value and E-E-A-T If an AI can easily summarize a topic using the top 10 results, you need to provide something it can’t replicate. Your content must offer unique value that makes a user want to click through for the full story.

    • Action: Focus on publishing original research, proprietary data, first-hand case studies, and content with a strong, expert point of view. This aligns perfectly with Google’s emphasis on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). A generic summary can’t match genuine expertise.

  3. Focus on Brand Visibility in a “Fewer Clicks” World Since AI Overviews often cite their sources, becoming a trusted, cited source is a new way to win. When users see your brand name repeatedly cited as the authority on a topic, they are more likely to seek you out directly.

    • Action: Build your site’s topical authority through high-quality, comprehensive content. In an era of fewer organic clicks for some queries, a strong brand that users recognize and trust is invaluable.

  4. Monitor Your Traffic and Diversify Measuring the direct impact of AI Overviews can be challenging, as Google Search Console doesn’t yet isolate these interactions.

    • Action: Monitor your informational pages for significant drops in clicks and impressions. Given the potential for reduced organic Google traffic, it’s also more important than ever to build and nurture other channels, like email lists, social media communities, and referral traffic.

Tools

Throughout this article, I’ll make reference to a couple of tools you can use to check the health of your technical SEO.

The most important of these tools is Google Search Console (GSC). GSC is free-to-use, and it provides you with many insights about things like:

  • How Google sees your website (which pages have been crawled/indexed, etc.)
  • Which keywords are attracting users to your site, impressions, and your rank
  • Alerts on site issues
google search console
search console report

GSC also allows you to interact with Google by submitting sitemaps (more on that later) and reporting when issues on your site have been fixed.

There are a number of third-party tools that can help you crawl your own website and detect issues. Screaming Frog is popular in our office for technical SEO work, but there are a slew of other tools you can get from Moz, Ahrefs, and others – these tools are more expensive (though, in some ways, more comprehensive) than Screaming Frog. 

Looking for an inexpensive way to crawl your site? You could always try Xenu’s Link Sleuth for a free option – it hasn’t been updated since 2010, and it doesn’t have a lot of features, but it’s great if you just want to find broken links. 

Don’t be too intimidated if you don’t quite know what these tools do or why you’d want to use them – all will be explained. Let’s start by helping users (and bots) navigate your website.

Your Website's Structure

Imagine you’re in a mall, looking for the food court. You check the map of the mall, and you see that in order to get to the food court, you’ve got to go through a Walmart, which is directly connected to a Best Buy, which is subsequently connected to a Bed, Bath, and Beyond. There is no other path to the food court – you must go through all three stores first.

I don’t know about you, but I’d about-face and leave that mall immediately. 

That’s what a bad sitemap looks like. Your pages need to be organized in an efficient hierarchy.

Optimizing Website Structure

From your website’s homepage, it should take 3 clicks, at most, to reach any other page on your website.

“But wait!”, I hear you saying, “I have thousands of pages! How is that possible?”

It’s all in your site’s architecture, my friend.

Let’s look at this in two ways: mathematically and visually.

On the mathematical side of things, your homepage is “click 0”. Imagine you have 10 links going from your homepage – “click 1” gets you to 10 new pages. From each of those pages, you might have another 10 links – “click 2” gets you to 100 unique pages. From each of those pages, another 10 links, and suddenly your users can access 1000 pages in 3 clicks.

It’s that simple. Now imagine you have more links on any one of those pages – you can easily multiply the number of pages that are accessible within 3 clicks. This makes your website easier to navigate for both users and bots.

Now for the visual example. Compare this:

site structure

To This:

under optimized site structure

It’s pretty easy to see which one is going to be easier to navigate. Expand that to thousands of pages and you can see why it’s important to have a shallow, 3 clicks or less hierarchy.

Obviously, the examples that we’ve talked about here are highly idealized – it’s unlikely that every page will have exactly 10 links from it – but try to get your website as close to this ideal form as possible.

URL Structure

One way we can go about approaching this idealized structure is by being mindful about how the URLs of our sites are built. There are three core things to keep in mind with URL structure: 

  • One site is easier to rank than multiple sites
  • Subfolders are preferred to subdomains (mysite.com/toronto over toronto.mysite.com)
  • Multiple subfolders are preferred over long, hyphenated URLs (mysite.com/toronto/seo/top-50-tips instead of mysite.com/toronto-seo-top-50-tips)

By consistently formatting your URLs in this way you’re, by necessity, keeping your site in line with optimal structuring – note that in the example given, it takes 3 clicks to get to the article, and it’s easy for the user (and bots) to navigate their way back from whence they came.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Hansel and Gretel’s use of breadcrumbs was ill-fated – fortunately, there are no digital birds to devour the breadcrumbs you leave on your website.

Breadcrumb navigation allows users to find their way home by following the breadcrumbs. It’s often used by large e-commerce sites or sites with so much content that it’s nearly impossible to fit the idealized 3 click structure we’ve described. Breadcrumb navigation looks like this

Homepage > Page clicked from homepage > Page clicked from second page … > Page you’re on.

Here’s an example from Best Buy:

I can immediately tell what page I’m on (freezers), and how I got there, so it’s easy to go back if I don’t find what I’m looking for. 

You should only implement breadcrumb navigation if it makes sense for your website. Most restaurants and retailers with only a few different products won’t benefit from this type of navigation – it’s best for navigating when there are dozens (or hundreds) of different category pages, each with different products.

Web Page Management

Now that you understand how your site should be structured, it’s time to look at the building blocks of that structure – your web pages.

Unique Content

Every page that you want indexed by search engines should be unique and useful to users. In the next section, we’ll talk about how to stop search engines from crawling and indexing pages that you don’t want them to. For now, let’s learn how to choose URLs, and how to handle pages that aren’t unique and/or useful.

Choosing URLs

We’ve already discussed how URLs should be structured – use those subfolders, people! When choosing URLs, keep it simple – the end of your URL should almost always be the page’s title. 

Let’s look at the example from above: the title of mysite.com/toronto/seo/top-50-tips should almost certainly be “Top 50 SEO Tips”, “Top 50 SEO Tips for Toronto”, or some such similar thing.

This accomplishes two key objectives: it enhances user experience by maintaining consistency, and it simplifies troubleshooting errors, redirecting pages, and other technical SEO tasks.

Handling Duplicate Pages

Things are going to be more technical from here on out – stick with it. Trust me, it’s worth it.

You may encounter pages on your website that are essential to a user’s experience, but not unique. This occurs, for example, when a product is available in multiple colours. 

While you may need a unique URL for all of those different colours, a Google user only needs one URL – from there, they can click the other colours to see what they like.

All of the text describing the product is likely to be the same. The price is likely to be the same. In this way, the separate pages are not unique, and search engines frown upon what they perceive as duplicate content.

Enter the canonical tag.

<link rel=“canonical”  href=“thecanonicalpage.com”>

What this tag does is tell search engines, “This page is not unique. The content on this page is a duplicate of the content on the canonical page. When crawling, indexing, and displaying search results, use the canonical page”.

Canonical Tag Best Practices

There are a few things to keep in mind when using canonical tags – some of these may seem obvious, but they help to illustrate the tag’s function.

 

First, you want to avoid mixed signals. When Page 1 says “Page 2 is canon” and Page 2 says “Page 1 is canon”, search engines won’t know which one is actually canon. Pick a page as your canonical page, and stick with it. 

 

Second, you should know that you can self canonicalize pages – and you should. Content management systems (CMS) and dynamic websites often automatically add tags to content, and these tags can look to search engines like unique URLs. By self canonicalizing all of your pages, you’ll avoid this trap.

 

Finally, you may have duplicate http: and https: pages on your site. We’ll talk more about HTTPS and SSL in the “Page Experience” section, but for now you just need to know that it’s almost always preferable to canonicalize your HTTPS page over your HTTP page.

Redirects

There are times when canonicalization isn’t appropriate, but a particular page on your website is no longer unique and useful. Let’s say, for example, we’d published a comprehensive SEO guide in 2010. In 2020, we publish a new comprehensive SEO guide to account for all the changes SEO has gone through in 10 years.

We don’t necessarily want to get rid of our 2010 guide, as we might have a lot of external and internal links pointing to it; however, we don’t want to provide our users with outdated information.

That’s where a 301 redirect might come in handy.

A 301 redirect informs search engines that a specific URL has been permanently redirected to a different URL. Any users who visit the redirected URL will be redirected to the new URL instead.

301 redirects are widely used in SEO. Some common uses for 301 redirects include:

  • Automatically redirecting http: traffic to the https: URL
  • Redirecting traffic when restructuring your website (perfect for cases where you’re changing from subdomains to subfolders)
  • Merging content that’s competing for the exact keywords
  • Redirecting 404s (Page not found)

Though there may be some very technical corner cases where you don’t want to use 301 redirects, if you’re reading this guide, chances are you won’t encounter them. Opt for 301 redirects over other 3xx codes.

301 Best Practices

Just like with canonical tags, there are ways to keep your 301 redirects well-organized to simplify things for both you and search engines.

  • Avoid redirect chains, i.e. Page 1 -> Page 2 -> Page 3. Instead, opt for Page 1 -> Page 3 and Page 2 -> Page 3.
  • Avoid redirect loops, i.e. Page 1 -> Page 2 -> Page 1. This should almost never come up, but it’s valuable to check for nonetheless – it’s a user experience killer (too many redirects can prompt an error).
  • Don’t add 301’d pages to your XML sitemap (more on that later)
  • Replace other 3xx redirects with 301 redirects
  • Fix any redirects to broken pages (404s, etc.)
  • Redirect all http: to https:

Finding things like redirect chains can seem complicated, especially if you’ve got a large website. This is where tools like Screaming Frog can come in handy – they can automatically find bad redirects, 3xx status codes, loops, and other redirect issues. They’re wonderful diagnostic tools, as long as you know how to fix the problems when you find them – and now you do!

301 or Canonicalization?

There are times when two pages might be very similar, but not exactly the same – in these cases, you might wonder whether you should perform a 301 redirect or simply canonicalize a page. 

As a rule of thumb, if you’re not sure which to use, opt for the 301. The cases we discussed in both sections are good examples of the use of each, so if those cases pop up for you, just refer to this guide!

Eliminate Useless Pages

There are, of course, cases where a page is actually useless. There’s no similar content, so a 301 isn’t appropriate – these pages should simply be eliminated (creating a 404). 

Keep in mind that a page is not useless if it’s getting traffic – traffic is the whole point of SEO. If a page is getting a lot of traffic but you feel its content is outdated, create a new page with better content, and 301 the original page to the new content to keep that traffic.

There may be cases in which a page is useless to search engines, but still useful to your clients. These are the cases we’ll address in this next section:

Robots.txt

When search engines index a web page, it can show up in search results. There are plenty of pages you don’t want showing up on SERPs, from your own internal search engine results to staging pages. In this section, you’ll learn how to tell search engines what you want them to crawl.

 

In other words, you’ll learn how to control robots. That’s a pretty decent superpower.

Meta Robots and X-Robots

Robots.txt works on the directory or site level – meta robots, on the other hand, instruct robots on how to behave on the page level.

 

The meta robots tag should be placed in the <head>. The format is:

<meta name=“ ”, content=“ ”>

 

In the meta name, you can put robots (to inform all bots how they should behave), or a specific bot (like Googlebot).

 

While there are a variety of things you can do with meta robots, for this introductory guide we’ll focus on content=“noindex” and content= “nofollow”, conveniently known, respectively, as noindex and nofollow.

 

Noindex is useful in a ton of scenarios – according to Google, any web page you don’t want indexed should be tagged with noindex. That’s because Google can index pages without crawling them if they’re pointed to by links.

 

Internal search results are great pages for noindex. You don’t want to include them in your robots.txt, because you want Googlebot and other search engine crawlers to follow all of the links on your search page – it’s a great way for them to get a more complete inventory of your website. On the flipside, if I’m using a search engine, the last thing I want in the results is a link to more search engine results.

 

The nofollow tag tells bots not to follow any links on a given page. This tag is rarely used on the page level, because you can instead choose to nofollow specific links by following this format when linking:

 

<a href=”https://websiteurl.com” title=”Website URL” rel=”nofollow”>.

 

There are a ton of things you might want to nofollow, but you should know that two of the most common nofollow cases, sponsored links and user comments, have specific code: for sponsored links, you should use rel=“sponsored”, while for user generated content, you should use rel=“ugc”.

 

X-Robots can do all of the things meta robots can do and more – you can, for example, use X-Robots to block bots from crawling and indexing any pdf on your site. While using X-Robots for this type of work falls outside the scope of this beginner’s guide, you can check out Google’s guide to X-Robots-Tag

 

One last note before we get off the topic of robots – some of you might have been using the noindex tag in your robots.txt file. Google no longer recognizes noindex in robots.txt, so you’ll have to manually noindex those pages.

 

You should also avoid including pages you don’t want indexed in your robots.txt. That might seem counterintuitive, but if a page can’t be crawled, search engines can’t see the noindex tag, and so they may index the page from links.

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a roadmap of all the important pages on your site that you want Google and other search engines to crawl and index. Think of it as providing a direct, clear list of your valuable content. Submitting this roadmap via Google Search Console is a fundamental SEO best practice.

 

 

Creating Your Sitemap in 2025

While you can still create a sitemap manually, this process is largely automated today. For most modern websites, the sitemap is dynamically generated and updated by the content management system (CMS).

  • The Best Method (Automatic): Platforms like WordPress (using plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math), Shopify, and Squarespace automatically create and update your sitemap. Whenever you add or remove a page, the sitemap is refreshed. This is the gold standard.

  • Manual & Crawl-Based Tools: If your site is custom-built or you need more granular control, desktop crawlers are perfect. You can use the free version of Screaming Frog for sites up to 500 pages. For a quick, no-install option on a small website, XML-Sitemaps.com is also a great choice.

Quality Over Quantity

You might hear that small sites or those with good internal linking don’t need a sitemap. Ignore this advice. It’s incredibly easy to implement a sitemap, and it’s a powerful way to guide crawlers.

The key is to ensure your sitemap is clean. Search engine crawlers don’t have infinite resources; you want them to spend their time on your valuable pages. Your sitemap should only list your final, canonical URLs.

It’s critical to exclude pages that don’t offer value or shouldn’t be indexed, such as:

  • Pages marked “noindex”

  • Redirected (301) or broken (404) URLs

  • Non-canonical pages

  • Internal search results or filtered navigation pages

By providing a clean, focused list, you help Google find and index the content you actually want it to see, which is more critical than ever in today’s competitive landscape.

Javascript and Indexing

In 2025, effectively managing JavaScript will be a core technical SEO skill. Most modern sites use JS frameworks like React or Vue, which present a unique challenge for search engines due to Google’s “two-wave” indexing process.

 

First, Googlebot crawls the initial HTML. For a client-side rendered app, this is often a nearly empty shell. Then, much later, the page is put into a second queue for rendering, where Google executes the JavaScript to see the final content. This delay is not just a simple wait; it has direct consequences. Rendering consumes significant crawl budget, meaning for larger sites, Google may process fewer pages. Furthermore, if your scripts are slow or complex, Google may time out before rendering completes, indexing an incomplete or blank page.

 

For Single-Page Applications (SPAs), the challenges are more specific. Internal links must be implemented with standard <a href="/path"> tags, not just JavaScript functions, or Googlebot cannot follow them. Additionally, metadata like <title> tags and meta descriptions must be dynamically updated for each “page” or view to avoid duplicate content issues.

 

To ensure fast and reliable indexing, you must serve a fully-rendered HTML page to Googlebot. There are three primary strategies:

  1. Static Site Generation (SSG): Best for sites with content that doesn’t change often (blogs, marketing sites). The entire site is pre-built into static HTML files that load instantly. This is the most efficient and SEO-friendly method.

  2. Server-Side Rendering (SSR): Ideal for dynamic sites (e-commerce, news). The server generates a full HTML page for each request, ensuring bots and users get fresh, complete content.

  3. Dynamic Rendering: A workaround where the server sends pre-rendered HTML to bots but the standard client-side app to users. This should be considered a temporary fix while implementing a full SSR or SSG solution.

Do not rely on the <noscript> tag as a primary SEO tactic; Google largely ignores it for indexing.

 

Finally, never assume your implementation works. Use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console to see precisely how Googlebot renders your page. This allows you to verify that your content and links are visible, confirming that your rendering strategy is successful.

 

Structured Data & Rich Results

Structured data is a standardized code (using the Schema.org vocabulary) that explains your content to search engines. It is essential for earning rich results and enhanced listings in search.

Why It’s Critical:

  • Unlocks Rich Results: Enables star ratings, prices, and FAQs directly in search results, which increases click-through rates.

  • Powers Modern Search: Feeds your information to Google’s Knowledge Panel and AI-driven results

Implementation:

  • Use JSON-LD: This is Google’s recommended format. Add it as a code snippet to your page’s HTML.

  • Deploy Key Schema: Start with schema types relevant to your content:

    • Organization: Your business logo, name, and contact info.

    • LocalBusiness: Your address, hours, and phone for local SEO.

    • Product: For e-commerce; shows price, availability, and reviews.

    • Article: For blogs and news to get into “Top Stories” carousels.

    • FAQPage: To display Q&As directly in the search results.

Implementing structured data is a direct way to improve how Google understands and displays your site.

Page Experience

The last thing we want to talk about is a set of signals Google calls “page experience”. Page experience signals are super relevant to your users, because they describe things like how quickly a page loads and how well it performs on mobile. While optimizing your page experience is out of the scope of this primer, I’ll take you through: 

 

  • What the signals are
  • How you can check your performance 
  • Basics things to keep in mind for optimization

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are the hot new commodity in the SEO world – Google is so excited about adding CWV to their ranking algorithm that they’re giving all of us several months notice before it goes live. May 2021 is the due date, so get your site ready!

CWV is made up of three different factors:

  • Largest contentful paint (LCP), which evaluates loading speed
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP) which evaluates interactivity
  • Cumulative layout shift (CLS), which evaluates visual stability

LCP

LCP is used to determine how quickly the main content of your page loads. There’s a lot you can do to reduce LCP loading times, from minifying your CSS and Javascript (Google has suggestions for minification tools) to using Content Delivery Networks

The best way to optimize LCP, though? Reduce the amount of data that needs to be loaded. This can be done by compressing or simply removing content. Google has a bunch more tips to optimize LCP.

INP

While LCP determines when your page’s main content becomes visible, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) now defines the overall responsiveness of your page to user interactions. Moving beyond just the first input, INP assesses the entire lifecycle of an interaction from a click, tap, or keypress to the subsequent visual update on the screen. A low INP score is crucial for a positive user experience and a key signal for search engine rankings in 2025.

Delays in responsiveness are often attributed to the cumbersome execution of JavaScript. To significantly improve your INP, it is essential to optimize the parsing, compilation, and execution of JavaScript. Techniques such as breaking up long tasks, deferring non-critical JavaScript, and minimizing main-thread work are paramount. Employing lazy-loading for both JavaScript and media assets not only enhances INP but can also contribute to a better LCP. Ultimately, streamlined JavaScript management is fundamental to mastering both LCP and the new standard of interaction readiness, INP, ensuring a fluid and engaging experience for your users.

CLS

CLS describes how much the content on a website shifts as users scroll through it. Shifts can be caused by a number of things, from improperly formatted images to dynamic advertisements. 

As you can imagine, Google has a comprehensive guide to CLS optimization, too. One key point from that guide is to opt, where possible, to have ads slots in the middle of the page instead of on top, as this tends to reduce how much content gets moved around if a dynamic ad is larger than anticipated.

page speed

GSC and PageSpeed Insights

Google really wants you to pay attention to your Core Web Vitals, as you might have guessed from the number of optimization guides they’ve provided and the name of the metric. As such, you can get insights about how a page is performing both through your Google Search Console and through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. I highly recommend using them regularly.

Mobile Friendly

We live in a mobile-first world, and for Google, your website is its mobile version. Since the completion of its mobile-first indexing initiative, Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking purposes. A non-negotiable cornerstone of technical SEO is ensuring this mobile experience is flawless.

A truly mobile-friendly site goes far beyond just being “responsive.” While a responsive design that adapts to all screen sizes is the baseline, Google’s ranking signals are far more sophisticated, revolving around the Page Experience. This includes:

  • Core Web Vitals (CWV): These are critical metrics measuring real-world user experience. A fast Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), a responsive Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and a stable Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are direct ranking factors. Slow loading times and clunky interfaces on mobile will actively harm your search performance.

  • Designing for the Mobile User: The user journey must be seamless and intuitive. This means streamlined navigation, easily tappable buttons, and simple forms. Every element must be optimized for a fast, intuitive mobile interaction.

  • Avoiding Intrusive Interstitials: The era of aggressive pop-up ads is a thing of the past. Google penalizes pages that display intrusive interstitials, which obscure content. Any pop-up, such as for a newsletter sign-up, must be easy to dismiss and not prevent the user from accessing the main content. Legally required interstitials, like those for cookie consent or age verification, are generally acceptable.

In short, thinking “mobile-first” is no longer a forward-thinking strategy; it’s the bare minimum for survival and success in the current SEO landscape.

mobile page speed test
mobile friendly

E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness

E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor in itself, but rather a set of principles Google’s human quality raters use to assess content. The signals that align with these principles are what influence rankings and determine if your content is trustworthy enough to be featured in an AI Overview. Ignoring E-E-A-T means ignoring the very definition of quality in Google’s eyes.

Experience

This is the “E” added in recent years, emphasizing the importance of first-hand, real-world knowledge. Google wants to see that the content creator has actually done what they are writing about.

  • How to Demonstrate It:

    • Original Media: Use your own original photos and videos showing the product in use, the process being explained, or the location being reviewed. Avoid using only stock imagery.

    • First-Hand Anecdotes: Share personal stories, case studies, and specific details that could only be known by someone with direct experience.

    • User-Generated Content: Leverage authentic customer reviews and testimonials that share their own experiences with your product or service.

Expertise

This refers to having a high level of skill or knowledge in a particular field. For sensitive “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) topics like medical, legal, or financial advice, this must be formal, credentialed expertise. For other topics, it can be demonstrated through depth of knowledge.

  • How to Demonstrate It:

    • Author Bios: Create detailed author pages and bylines for your content creators. List their credentials, education, years of experience, and links to other publications or their professional social media profiles (like LinkedIn).

    • In-Depth Content: Dive deeper into comprehensive explanations. Cover topics comprehensively, answer related questions, and explain complex concepts clearly.

    • Cite Sources: Link out to reputable, authoritative sources like academic studies, industry reports, and government websites to support your claims.

Authoritativeness

Authority is about your reputation, especially among other experts and influencers in your industry. When other recognized authorities see you as a go-to source of information, your authority grows.

  • How to Demonstrate It:

    • Quality Backlinks: Earn backlinks from respected, relevant websites in your niche. These act as votes of confidence from other authorities.

    • Mentions and Citations: Look for mentions of your brand, authors, or studies on other reputable sites, even if they are not linked.

    • Off-Site Presence: Showcase your authority beyond your own website. This includes speaking at industry conferences, appearing on podcasts, and contributing to well-known publications.

Trustworthiness

Trust is the most crucial component of E-E-A-T. An untrustworthy site has low E-E-A-T, regardless of how experienced or expert it may seem. Trust is about accuracy, transparency, and security.

  • How to Demonstrate It:

    • Site Security: Your site must use HTTPS. This is non-negotiable.

    • Transparency: Ensure a clear and easily accessible “About Us” page, complete contact information (including a physical address if applicable), and transparent privacy policies and terms of service.

    • Accuracy: Ensure your content is factually correct and kept up to date. If you make an error, correct it transparently. For news content, distinguish clearly between reporting and opinion.

    • Manage Reputation: Monitor and professionally respond to reviews on platforms like Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, and others. A positive online reputation is a powerful trust signal.

By systematically building and showcasing your Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, you are aligning your website with the core principles of Google’s quality systems. This not only improves your potential to rank in traditional search but is essential for establishing the credibility required to be a cited source in the new era of AI Overviews.

Website Security

Security is simple enough: don’t run a scam website, and get HTTPS certification.

 

On the first front, even if you’re not running a scam (I really hope you’re not), you might be flagged for security issues. You can look for security issues through GSC by clicking this button:

security issues in google search console

To be eligible for HTTPS, you need to get a SSL certificate. Fortunately, there are a lot of people who want the web to be safe to browse, so you can get an SSL certificate for free. Let’s Encrypt is a great place to start. You may already have certification and HTTPS – WordPress, for example, automatically provides HTTPS and redirects HTTP traffic to HTTPS.

Technical K.O

And with that, you can knock more technical SEO requirements off your list than 99% of website owners. While GSC and the other tools we’ve presented here can definitely help you find and fix technical problems, I can understand if this whole article was a bit complex.

Fortunately, if you think pouring all of this energy into technical SEO is going to be a bit too much effort, we can help. We’ve developed a free SEO audit tool – we’ll give you insights about how your site is performing from a technical perspective, free of charge. If you’re finding this all to much for you to handle, don’t worry at First Rank we have a team dedicated to this stuff, explore our Canadian SEO Services.