Technical SEO is the part of search optimization that most people either skip or outsource without understanding. That creates a real problem: if you do not know what technical SEO is supposed to accomplish, you cannot tell whether whoever is doing it is doing it well. This workshop gives participants enough working knowledge to audit their own sites, identify real problems, and make informed decisions about what to fix and in what order.
Why Technical SEO Gets Neglected
The honest answer is that it is harder to learn than it looks and the feedback loops are slow. You fix a crawl error and do not see a ranking change for weeks. You improve a Core Web Vitals score and the impact is ambiguous. It is much easier to write another blog post and feel productive than to dig into server response codes and crawl budget.
But the technical layer is the foundation everything else runs on. The best content in the world does not rank if Google cannot reliably crawl and index it. The most carefully written meta descriptions do not matter if your pages are accidentally set to noindex. I have audited sites where months of content investment were essentially invisible to Google because of a technical configuration issue that someone introduced without realizing it. That kind of problem is invisible until you look specifically for it.
What the Workshop Covers
Crawling and indexation fundamentals: How Googlebot discovers and prioritizes pages, what robots.txt actually does and does not do, how to use XML sitemaps effectively, and how to audit what Google has and has not indexed. We look at real crawl data, not theoretical models.
Common crawl budget issues: Infinite parameter URLs, session IDs that create duplicate content, pagination that generates thousands of thin pages, faceted navigation. These are the problems that quietly absorb crawl budget without producing indexable content. Participants leave knowing how to identify them and what to do about them.
Indexing decisions and noindex use: When to use noindex, when not to, and the common mistakes that accidentally prevent valuable pages from being indexed. Canonical tags — what they do, when they work, and when they do not.
Site architecture and internal linking: How page hierarchy communicates importance to search engines, how internal linking distributes PageRank, and how to audit the link structure of an existing site to find pages that are buried or orphaned.
Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift — what they measure, how to test them with PageSpeed Insights and Chrome User Experience Report, and what development changes actually move the numbers. I am honest about the relationship between Core Web Vitals and rankings: it is real but not deterministic, and I explain where it fits in a broader optimization priority list.
HTTPS, structured data, and mobile: The technical baseline signals that Google uses to assess site quality and trustworthiness. Most sites have all of these reasonably handled, but the exceptions matter, and knowing how to check is important.
Schema markup as technical infrastructure: Structured data overlaps with technical SEO in important ways — it is a technical implementation that communicates semantic meaning. I cover the technical side here and go deeper on strategy in the schema markup workshop.
Using tools effectively: Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Ahrefs or Semrush for technical data, and PageSpeed Insights. I demonstrate how to use these tools to find real issues, not just generate reports that look impressive but do not lead to action.
Workshop Format
The technical SEO workshop runs half a day at minimum and ideally a full day for the comprehensive version. Participants need a laptop with access to Google Search Console for at least one site — preferably a site they are actively responsible for.
The structure is alternating instruction and exercise. After each major section, participants apply what they just learned to their own site data. By the end of the day, they have a real audit in progress — not a template waiting to be filled in, but an actual list of issues they found themselves.
I cap group size at a level where I can review individual work and answer specific questions about specific sites. A technical SEO workshop where you never look at your own site is a lecture, not a workshop.
Who Gets the Most From This
The ideal participant is someone who has responsibility for SEO outcomes — either as an in-house specialist, a marketing manager who oversees an SEO vendor, or a business owner who manages their own site — and who wants to build enough technical fluency to know what they are looking at.
Developers who do not have SEO background also benefit significantly, because they can implement fixes but often do not know what to prioritize or why.
My Technical SEO Background
I run Salterra Digital Services and conduct technical audits as part of standard client work. I also teach technical SEO in SEO University cohorts, where the hands-on audit methodology I use in this workshop is part of the core curriculum. The issues I use as examples in the workshop are issues I have actually found and fixed on real sites — not constructed scenarios.
For a broader structured training program, see the SEO masterclass. For the full picture of speaking and training formats, visit the SEO speaker page.