Technical SEO that fixes the foundation before anyone builds on top
No amount of content or backlinks will save a site with broken technical fundamentals. Maxinium's technical SEO engagement makes your site crawlable, renderable, indexable, and AI-readable - in every modern search surface.
The technical SEO checklist Maxinium runs
Crawling & indexing
- ✓robots.txt allows all intended crawlers
- ✓Sitemap includes every canonical URL, nothing noindexed or redirected
- ✓No orphan pages
- ✓Internal search or filter URLs canonicalised
- ✓Pagination: rel=next/prev or view-all pattern
Core Web Vitals
- ✓LCP < 2.5s on mobile (we target <1.5s)
- ✓INP < 200ms
- ✓CLS < 0.1
- ✓Lazy-loading below-fold images
- ✓Critical CSS inlined, non-critical deferred
- ✓Font loading strategy: font-display:swap, preload fallback
Rendering
- ✓JavaScript-rendered content crawlable by Googlebot
- ✓Server-side rendering or static pre-rendering for content-heavy pages
- ✓No render-blocking resources on first paint
Schema markup
- ✓JSON-LD on every page
- ✓Organization + LocalBusiness + Person + WebSite + BreadcrumbList baseline
- ✓FAQPage wherever there are Q&A sections
- ✓Article/BlogPosting for blog content
- ✓Speakable for AI voice optimisation
International SEO
- ✓hreflang for en-LK, en-IN, en-US where relevant
- ✓x-default hreflang
- ✓Self-referencing hreflang on every variant
- ✓Translated URL slugs where relevant
AI search readiness
- ✓GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended explicitly allowed
- ✓llms.txt at root
- ✓llms-full.txt for training-data consent
- ✓Speakable schema on priority pages
Technical SEO FAQs
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is everything about how search engines (and AI crawlers) discover, crawl, render, and index your site - separate from content quality. It includes Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, crawl budget, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, structured data, JavaScript rendering, and internationalisation markup.
My rankings dropped. Is it technical?
~40% of sudden ranking drops we audit at Maxinium are technical (new JavaScript rendering problem, accidental noindex tag, robots.txt change, hreflang mistake, massive CLS regression). The other 60% are algorithm updates, backlink loss, or content decay. A proper technical audit isolates which.
Do I really need <400ms LCP?
2.5s LCP is Google's 'good' threshold - below that is acceptable. <1.5s is the Maxinium target for every client site - in competitive Sri Lankan SERPs, every 500ms of LCP improvement correlates with 3-5 ranking positions in our data.
How is technical SEO different in 2026?
Three big shifts: (1) INP replaced FID in March 2024, so interaction responsiveness matters much more than first-input; (2) AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) now matter as much as Googlebot for traffic - robots.txt has to treat them explicitly; (3) structured data expanded massively - Speakable, Dataset, VideoObject now drive AI citation which feeds AI Overview visibility.
Free technical SEO quick-check
Email your site URL and Alston will run a 10-minute Lighthouse + Search Console + Screaming Frog scan and reply with the top 3 technical fixes to make this week. Free, no obligation.
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