Technical SEO and GEO Basics for Business Websites (So Your Site Ranks, Converts, and Doesn’t Break)

Business websites are complex, unwieldy, and sometimes finicky beasts. What works today can break tomorrow. Add the near-constant evolution of web tech, SEO best practices, and AI-powered search, and it’s easy to feel like you’re always playing catch-up.

The good news is you don’t need to chase every shiny tactic to keep your site healthy. Search engines still reward the basics: fast pages, clean structure, secure delivery, and a website that’s easy to navigate. And now, those same basics power GEO too.

This post covers the core technical SEO factors you should stick to, plus how those same improvements help GEO, meaning your site’s more likely to show up in AI summaries, answer boxes, and “quick answers” people skim instead of clicking.

What Technical SEO and GEO Actually Mean

Technical SEO’s the behind-the-scenes work that helps your website get crawled, indexed, rendered, and understood by search engines.

GEO’s about making your site easier for AI-driven search experiences to interpret and surface, which depends heavily on the exact same stuff: structure, clarity, performance, and trust signals.

You can publish an incredible blog post that should drive traffic for years. If it loads slowly, throws errors, or’s hard to parse, it won’t rank the way it should. And it’s less likely to be pulled into AI summaries that are basically the new “position zero.”

Think of technical SEO as the foundation your content sits on. GEO’s what happens when that foundation’s strong enough that machines can confidently quote you.

Website Builders & Technical SEO/GEO

It’s easier than ever to build a website with WordPress, Squarespace, or Wix. You can launch something polished without hiring a full dev team.

But DIY sites often run into the same issue: they look fine, but they underperform. Or they work until they don’t. And when they don’t, it’s not just rankings that take a hit. AI-driven search can skip messy pages too, because it can’t confidently understand what your page’s saying.

A user-friendly design’s only half the job. The other half is making sure search engines and AI systems can access, interpret, and trust your content.

That’s technical SEO and GEO working together. Let's dive into what issues can look like within technical SEO and GEO. 

What Are Technical SEO and GEO Issues?

Technical SEO issues are problems that hurt rankings, usability, or both.

GEO issues are the problems that make your content harder to extract and reuse in AI-driven search. It’s the same mess, just with an extra consequence: even if your page exists, it’s not being used.

Some issues are urgent. Some are more like “this’ll slowly make your traffic worse over time.”

For example:

• A broken link to your services page from a high-traffic blog post is urgent.

• Duplicate metadata on a low-value archive page isn’t ideal, but it isn’t a five-alarm fire.

• A confusing heading structure might not tank your rankings overnight, but it can absolutely reduce how often your page gets featured in AI answers.

The key is knowing what to fix first, then circling back for the rest.

Addressing Issues: Run a Technical SEO Audit (With GEO in Mind)

If you want to find issues quickly, run a technical SEO audit using a crawler tool like:

• SEMrush

• Ahrefs Site Audit

• Google PageSpeed Insights

• Moz Pro

• HubSpot SEO tools

Most tools’ll categorize issues by severity, like Critical, High, Medium, and Low.

Start with Critical and High. Those’re the issues most likely to block crawling, damage user experience, or cause traffic drops.

Then, as you fix things, keep asking one extra question for GEO:
“If an AI system landed here, would it confidently understand what this page’s about and what it’s trying to answer?”

If the answer’s “meh,” you’ve got GEO work to do.

Common Technical SEO Issues (And How They Hit GEO Too)

1. HTTP Response Code Errors (404, 403, and Friends)

These are some of the most common issues you’ll see in audits.

A quick crash course:

• 404 means the page doesn’t exist

• 403 means the page exists, but access’s restricted

Both frustrate users. Too many can also waste crawl budget and lead to weaker indexing.

And for GEO, it’s even simpler: AI systems can’t pull from content they can’t access. If your best resources are returning errors, you’re basically hiding your own work.

Fix:
Set up 301 redirects from broken or retired URLs to the most relevant existing page. Always redirect old URLs when you delete or replace pages, especially during redesigns or migrations.

2. Broken Images and Media

Links break, and media breaks too. It’s more annoying because now your page looks like it’s held together with tape.

This often happens when you embed external content and the source changes or disappears. Videos get unlisted. Files get removed. Image URLs change.

It also affects GEO because AI summaries and rich results lean on media context. Missing images can reduce clarity, and broken embeds can make the page look lower-quality.

Fix:

• self-host images and documents when possible

• audit embedded media occasionally

• replace or remove broken assets quickly

For video hosting, talk to your developer or hosting provider if you’re unsure about the pros and cons of self-hosting.

3. Mixed Content Issues (HTTPS Page, HTTP Assets)

Mixed content happens when a secure page (HTTPS) loads something insecure (HTTP), usually an image, script, or embedded file.

This can trigger browser warnings and reduce trust. Search engines don’t love it. AI systems don’t love uncertainty either. If the page looks insecure or inconsistent, it’s less likely to be treated as a reliable source.

Fix:
Update asset URLs to use https:// and confirm your CMS, CDN, and plugins aren’t injecting old HTTP links.

4. Slow Page Speed (The Silent Traffic Killer)

Pages are made of files. More files and bigger files usually means slower load times.

Speed issues are commonly caused by:

• oversized images and videos

• too many scripts

• render-blocking JavaScript

• excessive server requests

Slow pages hurt rankings and conversions. People bounce. Search engines take notes.

Speed hits GEO too because AI-driven experiences still rely on crawl and render systems. If your page’s slow or unstable, it’s less likely to be pulled, cached, or trusted.

Fixes that often have the biggest impact:

• resize images to the exact size they display on the page

• compress images before uploading

• use simpler file formats when possible (JPEG when transparency isn’t needed)

• remove scripts you don’t need

• defer scripts when possible so the page loads first

If scripts are blocking rendering, you can sometimes defer them by moving them to the footer. Another option’s inlining small scripts that rarely change.

5. Meta Title and Meta Description Errors

Metadata still matters, and not just the copy. The technical delivery matters too.

For SEO, titles and descriptions influence rankings and click-through rates. For GEO, they influence clarity and context. If your metadata’s missing or duplicated, you’re making it harder for search engines and AI systems to quickly understand what the page’s about.

Common problems include:

• Missing <title> tags or meta descriptions

• Duplicated metadata across many pages

• Metadata not rendering in the <head>

Fix:

• View the page source and confirm your <title> and <meta> tags exist

• Write unique titles and descriptions for important pages

• Avoid templates that automatically duplicate metadata across everything

6. Weak Structure (This One’s Quietly Crushing GEO)

Here’s the one a lot of sites miss: structure.

If your headings are messy, your sections are vague, and your paragraphs run long, humans skim past you. AI systems do too.

If you want better SEO and GEO, your page should have:

• One clear H1 that matches the main topic

• Scannable H2s that describe real subtopics

• Short paragraphs that answer a question fast

• Lists and steps when it makes sense

• Definitions when you’re using jargon

Fix:
Rewrite sections so each one has a clear purpose and a clear answer. If you can’t summarize a section in one sentence, it’s probably doing too much.

7. Missing Schema Markup (Helpful for SEO, Really Helpful for GEO)

Schema isn’t magic, but it’s a translator. It tells search engines and AI systems what your content actually is.

Schema types that commonly help business sites:

• Organization

• LocalBusiness (if relevant)

• Article

• FAQPage (only if you’ve got real FAQs)

• Product (if you sell products)

Fix:
Add schema for the pages that matter most and keep it accurate. Bad schema’s worse than no schema.

Bottom Line: Healthy Technical SEO & GEO Are Unavoidable

Inbound marketing works best when your site’s stable, fast, and crawlable. That’s technical SEO.

And if you want your content to show up more often in AI-driven search experiences, your site also needs to be structured, clear, and trustworthy. That’s GEO.

If your traffic’s dipped but submissions are still coming in, that’s a clue. Your conversion path’s probably fine, but visibility has slipped. This approach helps by tightening the technical foundation, improving clarity, and making your content easier for both search engines and AI systems to understand and surface.

If you're ready to take the next step and look at your website from an SEO and GEO standpoint, reach out to our team at protocol 80 for a clear path forward.

Technical SEO Auditing

Now that you know the difference between technical and content SEO and some of the issues you can run into with them, what now?

Fortunately, you won’t have to look far for a solution: a technical SEO audit tool.

There are plenty of options to choose from that check a website for SEO issues and provide you insights on what makes it tick:

• SEMRush
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Ahrefs auditing tool
• Moz Pro
• Hubspot SEO tool

Some of these tools are geared towards certain, niche aspects, while others attempt to address everything. With these, you should be able to kick back and let the fancy web crawler magic do its work as it picks apart your site in search of potential problems.

Once the crawling is complete, it’s time to figure out what to do about the errors it found.

Most site-auditing tools like the above will categorize the issues it finds based on their immediate impact on the website’s SEO health. Typically, you’ll see them rated from “critical” and “high” down to a “warning” or “notice.”

Generally, you’ll want to tackle the highest-rated issues first, as these will have an immediate impact on anyone trying to visit your site.

Common Technical SEO Issues (and How to Fix Them)

Now that you’ve run your audit, it’s time to dive in and get these SEO issues fixed. Ideally, you’ll be up against some common and relatively simple errors to fix:

1. HTTP Response Code Errors

These will likely be the most common errors you will face on a continuous basis. You’ve likely happened upon a 404 error before when you’ve tried to access a webpage. This is just one example of an HTTP response code.

Without going into too much detail, here’s a crash course. When someone tries to visit your webpage, a protocol is initiated to fetch this data from your server. A lot of complex networking is happening behind the scenes, and there’s a batch of response codes it can send to your browser if it runs into a problem.

Some of the HTTP errors you’ll see most often are 403 and 404, which generally just mean that the browser (i.e. Google Chrome) made it to your server, but couldn’t access the information to load the webpage. A 403 indicates the content is disabled or restricted for certain visitors, like a bank statement that can only be accessed if they’re logged in. A 404 means that the webpage simply doesn’t exist.

The quickest fix for these errors is to set up a simple URL redirect, from the page that is causing the error to a new or existing page with similar information or uses. Make sure that redirects are set up when old pages are deleted or retired, as these URLs could still be linked elsewhere on the internet.

2. Broken Images and Media

Much like links within your content, any media you use on your website deserves extra-close attention. This is especially true if you find yourself embedding a lot of external media.

If you use services like YouTube and Vimeo as your primary video-hosting provider, you could eventually find that any media you embed could be unlisted and removed. This will sever that connection on your website, which could result in your content not making much sense to visitors.

We recommend self-hosting media files like images and documents yourself to reduce the likelihood of something being deleted. For video, it may be best to consult your website hosting provider and developer to understand the pros and cons of hosting your own media.

3. Mixed Content

“Mixed content” may be a bit confusing at first, as it doesn’t directly describe the issue at hand. This technical SEO error is caused by content on your page using two different protocols, which jeopardizes the security of your website data. That sounds more dangerous than it typically is.

Nine times out of 10, this issue is simply an image or video that uses HTTP (an unsecure protocol for transferring data)  on a page that loads using HTTPS (its more secure cousin). This could be due to a content distribution network issue or that you have conflicting protocols being used on your website. The best place to start is updating the media source reference in your HTML to use “https://” instead of “http://”.

4. Slow Page Speed

All websites and pages are composed of files. Think of it as a library, and each book is a page. Your user’s internet connection is their limit to how large a book they can read at a time. The more pages in the book, the longer it takes to read. 

Now apply this to download speeds. Think of a text-heavy Wikipedia page vs. a manufacturer’s homepage with a 50MB video on it. The more files a server must request to display the page, the longer it’ll take to load. Slow page loading is one of the leading triggers of SEO penalties.

This issue doesn’t necessarily just apply to large image and video files.

Sometimes, you’ll encounter large script files that delay the rendering of the page until after they’re loaded. This is referred to as “render-blocking” and is commonly associated with JavaScript.

You can sometimes defer scripts by moving their reference to the page’s footer, which allows the bulk of the page to load first. This method won’t always work if you have content that requires the script to be loaded to perform its function, but it can be worth a shot. Another opportunity for shrinking JavaScript files is to remove the script reference entirely and “inline” it directly in the page.

Not inline:

Inline:

Notice that we are no longer referencing a file path to our script and have instead put it directly on the page so the server doesn't have to request a whole new file. This is only recommended for small scripts that require very infrequent edits.

If your poor page speed is the result of images and other media, resize them to be precisely the size they’re displayed on the page. You can also use less complex file formats that don’t require as much data like using a JPEG image in place of a PNG when transparency is not necessary. This simple adjustment can save you a couple kilobytes here and there which does add up considerably.

5. Meta Description and Title Errors

We’ve known for years that writing great meta descriptions and titles is a boon to SEO performance ... But what about the technical aspects of these two signals? It’s just as important that these bits of info lead into your page correctly and search engines find them without issue.

The first thing to do is confirm your metadata is being loaded on the page. The easiest way to do this is view the page source and make sure your appropriate <meta> tags are showing up where they need to in the head.

You may also receive error warnings if this information is duplicated across multiple pages. The simplest fix here is to write meaningful and unique content for each page’s metadata.

Technical SEO Issues & Safely Updating Your Site

At the end of the day, there’s simply too much to cover regarding technical SEO, best practices, and how to fix all of the possible errors you may encounter. However, you also have access to so many resources to help you tackle these problems at the source.

While fixing some errors may require minimal interaction with the guts of a business website, you may find that older websites are harder to maintain, as technical SEO rules are always adapting. If you find yourself redesigning or migrating your website, this may be the best time to fix these issues before they make it to the new and final version.