Technical SEO explained simply

Technical SEO produces forty-page audits and impressive red-and-green tables. Let's be clear: it will not push you up Google. It only stops you from being absent. It is a floor, not a ceiling — but a floor with holes in it drops everything you stand on it.

What Google has to be able to do

• Find your pages. A page no internal link mentions and no sitemap lists does not exist.
• Read them. If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, expect a delay — and sometimes nothing at all.
• Know which one to keep. The same page reachable with and without “www”, with and without a trailing slash, with campaign parameters: one page to you, several to Google, and your authority splits between them.

Speed is measured where your customers are

A site tested over European fibre gets a flattering score. The same site, opened in Abidjan on shared 4G at the end of the day, takes eight seconds. That second number is the one that counts, because it is the one your visitors live with.

And the biggest wins are almost never in the code: they are images published at their original size, fonts that block rendering, and tracking scripts stacked up and never removed. A page loading three ad trackers will not be rescued by compression.

The particular case of two languages

A badly declared bilingual site competes with itself: Google sees two near-identical pages, keeps one, and serves English to your French-speaking visitors. Language alternate tags fix this — provided each version points to the other and to itself, and that the link leads to the equivalent page rather than the homepage. Half a day of work decides half of your audience.

Once that floor is in place, stop going back to it. What lifts you afterwards is what you write, and the people who talk about it.