There’s a widespread belief that SEO starts when you begin writing blog articles. That the content strategy is the engine, and that by publishing regularly about your industry you’ll sooner or later appear in Google.
It’s partly correct. The problem is that it ignores an entire layer that comes first: the site’s technical base.
Publishing content on a site with technical problems is like building on unstable ground. The effort isn’t wasted, but it produces far less than it could if the base were in order.
What technical SEO is and why it matters
Technical SEO isn’t writing well or choosing the right keywords. It’s making sure Google can find, read and correctly interpret your site’s pages.
If Google can’t crawl a page, that page doesn’t exist for the search engine. If it can crawl it but doesn’t understand what it’s about, it will index it badly and either appear for irrelevant searches or not appear at all.
Content is the raw material. The technical base is the infrastructure that lets that content reach whoever is looking for it.
The points to check
1. Indexing: can Google see your pages?
The first step is confirming your most important pages are indexed. Google Search Console (free) shows this directly. Look for the “Coverage” or “Page indexing” report.
It’s common to find important pages excluded by mistake — a badly configured robots.txt, noindex attributes left over from an earlier build, duplicate URLs competing with each other.
2. Title tags: the most underestimated element
The title tag is the text appearing in the browser tab and in the Google result. It’s the on-page factor with the most direct weight in SEO.
The most common error: every page’s title is the same (the company name and nothing else), or it’s auto-generated by the CMS and never reviewed.
A good title describes precisely what that specific page contains, includes the main keyword, and runs between 50 and 60 characters so it isn’t truncated in the results. Every page on the site should have a unique title.
3. Meta descriptions: they don’t affect ranking, but they do affect the click
The meta description isn’t a direct ranking factor. But a well-written description improves the click-through rate from search results — and that does affect SEO indirectly.
The description should explain what the person clicking will find, be relevant to the search, and run between 140 and 160 characters. Repeating the title doesn’t help, and neither does leaving the field empty (Google will fill it with arbitrary text from the page).
4. Heading structure: H1, H2, H3
Every page should have exactly one H1 — the main title, carrying the central keyword. H2s organise the main sections. H3s subdivide those sections where needed.
The frequent error on visually-built sites: using headings to style text rather than to structure content. A designer puts a paragraph in H3 because they liked the font size. The result is a broken semantic hierarchy that Google misreads.
5. Load speed, especially on mobile
Google has used mobile performance as a ranking factor since 2021 (Mobile First Indexing). A site loading in more than four seconds on mobile is at a real disadvantage against faster competitors.
The most common problems:
- Images uncompressed and not in a modern format (WebP)
- Heavy JavaScript blocking rendering
- No caching configured
- Slow hosting
PageSpeed Insights (free) gives an initial diagnosis with concrete recommendations.
6. Clean URLs and a coherent structure
URLs should be readable and descriptive. /services/infrastructure-consulting is better than /page?id=47&cat=3. Not only for the user — it’s also easier for Google to understand what the page is about.
The URL structure should also reflect the site’s hierarchy. If you have services under /services/, every service should be there. Inconsistencies like /consulting at one level and /services/audit at another create crawl confusion.
7. Structured data: giving Google context
Structured data (Schema.org) is code telling Google exactly what each element of a page is: this is an organisation, this is a service, this is an article, this is a breadcrumb.
It isn’t mandatory for ranking, but it improves how the site appears in results (rich snippets) and helps Google understand the content better.
For a B2B corporate site, the useful minimum is Organization on the home page and Service on the service pages.
The right order
Before publishing the first blog article, the checklist should be complete:
- ✓ Indexing verified in Search Console
- ✓ Unique, descriptive title tags on every page
- ✓ Meta descriptions written for the main pages
- ✓ Correct H1/H2/H3 structure across the site
- ✓ Acceptable load speed on mobile
- ✓ Clean URLs and a coherent structure
- ✓ Basic schema implemented
With that base in order, every article you publish will rank better and faster than it would have from a site with unresolved technical problems. If you’d rather delegate this review, PTW’s technical SEO covers it as the starting point before any content strategy.
If you don’t know your site’s current state on any of these points, that is exactly where the technical diagnostic PTW runs begins.