In short: Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes optimisations that help search engines and AI platforms crawl, understand, and index your website correctly. These five fixes — viewport meta tag, canonical URLs, heading hierarchy, image alt text, and image compression — typically improve a Bump Score by 15–20 points.
If your website doesn’t have <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> in the <head>, mobile users see a zoomed-out desktop version. Google explicitly penalises this in mobile rankings.
Fix: Add the tag to your HTML template or CMS header settings. One line, massive impact.
Duplicate content confuses search engines. If your homepage is accessible at both example.com and example.com/index.html, Google sees two competing pages.
Fix: Add <link rel="canonical" href="https://yourdomain.com/page"> to every page. Most CMS platforms have a setting for this. It tells search engines which version is the “real” one.
Many websites skip heading levels (H1 → H3, missing H2) or use multiple H1 tags. This confuses both search engines and screen readers.
Fix: Every page should have exactly one H1 (your page title), followed by H2s for sections, H3s for subsections. Never use headings for visual styling — use CSS instead.
Images without alt text are invisible to search engines and inaccessible to screen reader users. For estate agents, this often means property photos — your most valuable visual content — aren’t being indexed.
Fix: Add descriptive alt text to every image. “3-bedroom Victorian terrace in Clapham, south-facing garden” is far better than “property-photo-1.jpg”.
Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor. The most common cause of slow pages? Uncompressed images. A single 5MB property photo can add 3+ seconds to your load time.
Fix: Use WebP format, set maximum dimensions (1920px wide is plenty for web), and use lazy loading for below-the-fold images. Tools like Squoosh or your CMS’s built-in compression can automate this.
These five fixes typically improve a Bump Score by 15–20 points. But they’re just the starting point. Run a free scan to see your full technical health report and get a prioritised list of everything else that needs attention.
Technical SEO covers the structural elements of your website that affect how search engines and AI platforms access and understand your content. It includes page speed, mobile-friendliness, structured data, canonical tags, and crawlability.
The five fixes in this guide can each be completed in under 10 minutes. Together they typically improve a Bump Score by 15–20 points.
Yes. AI platforms rely on well-structured HTML to extract and cite content. Pages with proper heading hierarchy, canonical tags, and structured data are significantly more likely to be cited (Princeton GEO Study, KDD 2024).
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