Technical SEO
Technical SEO makes sure your website works on every device and loads in under 2.5 seconds, measured with Google’s own speed test.
It is the groundwork for ranking on Google in Finland: before a single Finnish keyword counts, search engines have to be able to read your pages fast.
Happy clients since 2012
Test your website’s technical SEO
If your website does not load fast, it will never show up well on search engines.
In 2020 Google announced a more thorough way to measure a site’s speed and user experience. Instead of the loading time alone, it measures the Core Web Vitals:
- LCP, Largest Contentful Paint: how long until most of the page has loaded on the screen?
- INP, Interaction to Next Paint: how quickly does the page respond when you do something on it? It replaced the first responsiveness metric, FID, in 2024.
- CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift: how much does the layout move while the page loads?
The picture shows my own website in Google’s speed test. Try yours:
Technical audit and fixes
The technical audit is part of the SEO project. These are the points I go through and fix.
Speed test
I test the site's loading speed with Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix and Pingdom Tools.
Speed fixes
I fix the speed if the site scores under 90/100.
Mobile use
I test the site with Google's mobile test and on a phone and a tablet, and fix the problems.
HTTPS
I make sure the site works over a secure HTTPS connection, and set it up if it is missing.
Robots.txt
I check that robots.txt does not stop search engines from reading the pages, and set it to guide them to the right places.
Robots meta tags
I check that the pages' robots meta tags do not stop search engines from reading them.
XML sitemap
I check that the XML sitemap is built right, make one if needed and submit it to the search engines.
Indexing
I find out which pages Google has indexed.
Index and sitemap
I compare the number of pages in Google's index with the XML sitemap and find out why they differ.
HTTP errors
I find error codes such as 404 (page not found) and fix them.
Code errors
I check whether the site is coded correctly and whether it loads needless, slow files, and fix the errors.
HTML validation
I check whether the HTML has serious errors.
Site structure
I make sure all content is within two clicks and no page is left without links.
URL structure
I check that the addresses are short and user-friendly and contain the keyword.
Duplicate content
I find the places where the same content repeats and fix them with a canonical tag.
Copied content
I check whether the site's texts have been copied from other websites.
Tags
I check that every page has a title, a meta description and image alt texts, that they are clear and that they contain the page's keyword.
A Finnish version beside your English one
Many companies that start selling in Finland add a Finnish version to their English website, and often a Swedish one too: Finland has two official languages.
Each language version needs addresses of its own and hreflang tags, which tell Google which version to show to whom. Without them, Google may show your English page to people searching in Finnish, or treat the versions as copies of each other.
In the audit I also look at your language versions.
Learn technical SEO yourself?
Read my SEO guide for professionals if you want to learn to do technical SEO yourself. The guide covers
- technical SEO in great depth
- the principles of SEO in more depth
- the steps, with examples.
Ask me
Send me an email or book a free SEO check, and we'll see whether I can help. We can talk in English.
Free SEO check
A 60-minute Google Meet call: we look at how your website shows up on Google in Finland.