Technical SEO Fixes That Saved a Bakery’s Orders

Technical SEO can feel like navigating a minefield. One wrong step, and your website vanishes from search results. Is there a way to build a bulletproof technical SEO strategy that actually delivers results? Absolutely.

I remember when Sarah, the owner of “Sarah’s Sweet Sensations,” a local bakery near the intersection of Clairmont and Briarcliff in Decatur, came to me practically in tears. Her online orders had plummeted. “I don’t understand it,” she lamented. “My cakes are the best in DeKalb County, but nobody can find me online anymore!”

Her beautiful website, filled with mouthwatering photos of custom cakes, was practically invisible. A quick audit revealed the problem: a disastrous technical SEO setup. Her site was slow, riddled with broken links, and Google couldn’t properly crawl it. It was like she’d built a gorgeous bakery with no roads leading to it.

The first thing we tackled was site speed. Sarah’s website was loading at a glacial pace, over 8 seconds. According to Google’s own research, [53% of mobile users leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load](https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/why-performance-matters). That’s a lot of potential cake lovers clicking away!

We implemented several strategies:

1. Image Optimization: Sarah’s high-resolution cake photos were gorgeous, but they were also huge. We compressed them using TinyPNG, reducing file sizes without sacrificing too much quality.
2. Caching: We implemented browser caching to store static elements of the site on users’ devices, so they wouldn’t have to download them every time they visited.
3. Content Delivery Network (CDN): We used a CDN to distribute Sarah’s website content across multiple servers, ensuring faster loading times for users regardless of their location.

Next up: mobile-first indexing. Google officially switched to mobile-first indexing in 2019, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of a website for indexing and ranking. Sarah’s site, while technically “responsive,” was clunky and difficult to navigate on mobile devices.

We redesigned the mobile experience, simplifying the navigation, optimizing images for smaller screens, and ensuring that all content was easily accessible. We made the “Order Now” button prominent and easy to tap. This is critical! According to a 2025 IAB report, [over 70% of online orders for local businesses originate on mobile devices](https://iab.com/insights/). If your mobile experience is bad, you’re losing money.

A crucial aspect of technical SEO is ensuring search engines can actually crawl and index your website. Sarah’s robots.txt file, which instructs search engine bots on which pages to crawl or ignore, was misconfigured, blocking Googlebot from accessing key sections of her site. I’ve seen this happen more times than I care to admit. We corrected the robots.txt file and submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console. If you need help with local SEO, see how we ranked #1 locally for another client.

We also focused on structured data markup. This involves adding code to your website that provides search engines with more information about your content. We used Schema.org vocabulary to mark up Sarah’s cake recipes, customer reviews, and business information. This helped Google understand the context of her content and display it more effectively in search results.

Here are 10 technical SEO strategies that we used to help Sarah, and that you can use to improve your website’s performance:

1. Conduct a Comprehensive Site Audit: Use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to identify technical SEO issues, such as broken links, crawl errors, and slow-loading pages. Fix them!
2. Optimize Site Speed: As mentioned before, site speed is critical. Compress images, leverage browser caching, and use a CDN. Consider using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to identify areas for improvement.
3. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness: Make sure your website is fully responsive and provides a seamless experience on all devices. Test your site’s mobile-friendliness with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
4. Implement Structured Data Markup: Use Schema.org vocabulary to add structured data markup to your website. This helps search engines understand the context of your content and display it more effectively in search results.
5. Optimize Your Robots.txt File: Ensure your robots.txt file is properly configured to allow search engines to crawl and index your website. Double-check that you’re not accidentally blocking important pages.
6. Create and Submit a Sitemap: A sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website. Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console helps search engines discover and crawl your content more efficiently.
7. Fix Broken Links: Broken links create a poor user experience and can hurt your search engine rankings. Use a tool like Broken Link Check to identify and fix broken links on your website.
8. Implement HTTPS: HTTPS is a secure protocol that encrypts communication between your website and users’ browsers. Google has confirmed that HTTPS is a ranking factor, so it’s essential to implement it on your website.
9. Optimize Your Website Architecture: A well-organized website architecture makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content. Use a clear and logical structure, and ensure that all pages are easily accessible.
10. Monitor Your Website’s Performance: Regularly monitor your website’s performance using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This will help you identify potential issues and track your progress over time.

Beyond these core strategies, consider these additional points:

• Canonical Tags: Use canonical tags to tell search engines which version of a page is the “original” when you have duplicate content. This prevents search engines from penalizing you for duplicate content.
• Pagination: If you have a lot of content that is spread across multiple pages, use pagination to help search engines crawl and index all of your content.
• Core Web Vitals: Pay attention to Google’s Core Web Vitals, which are a set of metrics that measure user experience. These metrics include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Improving your Core Web Vitals can improve your search engine rankings. I’ve seen rankings jump noticeably for sites with excellent scores.
• XML Sitemap Updates: Don’t just submit your sitemap once. Regularly update it whenever you add new content or make changes to your website.
• Regular Crawl Error Monitoring: Keep a close eye on crawl errors in Google Search Console and fix them promptly. Ignoring crawl errors can prevent search engines from indexing your content.

Here’s what nobody tells you: technical SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time fix. You need to continuously monitor your website’s performance and make adjustments as needed. Learn how AI will shape technical SEO in the coming years.

Within a few months of implementing these technical SEO strategies, Sarah’s Sweet Sensations saw a dramatic improvement in online visibility. Her website started ranking higher in search results, and her online orders skyrocketed. She even opened a second location near Emory University!

Technical SEO is not about tricking search engines. It’s about making it easier for them to understand and index your content, and providing a great user experience. The marketing landscape is constantly changing, but solid technical SEO remains a foundational element of any successful online strategy. You can drive even more growth when you optimize your content, too.

Don’t let technical SEO be a barrier to your online success. Prioritize mobile optimization. It’s no longer optional, it’s essential. Make sure your website delivers a lightning-fast, user-friendly experience on every device, and you’ll be well on your way to dominating the search results. Thinking about how to outsmart AI and win search? Start with the technical elements.