Technical SEO Metrics: What Are They & Why You Want to Track Them

You’ve set your SMART SEO goals and implemented an SEO strategy. You’ve figured out how to measure search visibility, SEO conversions, and website traffic. Now nothing’s standing between you and the first page of Google, right?

Unfortunately, there might be technical issues you haven’t thought about yet that make your site hard for search engines to find and hard for visitors to use.

Now’s the time to get serious about technical SEO metrics. Let’s walk through what you’ll want to measure, why it matters, and how to improve the technical aspects of your site for search.

Technical SEO Basics

Technical SEO is an umbrella term for various site and server optimizations that help search engines index your web pages more efficiently and create a better user experience.

Why Does Technical SEO Matter?

Technical SEO lets search engines find, render, and index your pages, and every other search effort depends on that. 

Having your technical SEO house in order means Google can crawl the pages on your site quickly and easily, without hitting noindex roadblocks or redirect loops.

A page that Google can’t crawl or index can’t rank, whatever its content quality.

A better position in search results can help you meet marketing goals like:

• Increasing traffic to your website
• Improving brand awareness
• Enhancing user experience
• Increasing engagement
• Increasing ecommerce sales
• Boosting lead generation

How Technical Health Affects AI Search Visibility

Before an AI system can quote your page, its crawler has to reach and read the page, then add it to the pool of content the system retrieves from. In our approach to answer engine optimization (AEO), that inclusion step comes before anything about content quality or authority. A page that’s blocked or unindexed never enters the pool of candidates.

JavaScript is one place this breaks. A December 2024 analysis of a month of crawler traffic by Vercel and MERJ found that none of the major AI crawlers, including those behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, rendered JavaScript. Copy that only appears after a script runs may be invisible to those systems.

Crawler behavior changes, so test your own pages. View the page source and confirm the core copy sits in the raw HTML, then check that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking AI user agents by accident.

How Do You Measure Technical SEO?

Site administrators can track dozens of technical metrics, or key performance indicators (KPIs), but four areas cause many technical problems: page load speed and Core Web Vitals, pages indexed, crawl errors, and mobile friendliness. Site health scores from crawling tools roll the errors they find into one number.

Metric	What it tells you	Where to read it	What passing looks like
Core Web Vitals	Loading, responsiveness, and visual stability	PageSpeed Insights, Search Console Core Web Vitals report	Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) 200 milliseconds or less, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile
Pages indexed	How many of your URLs Google has added to its index	Search Console Page indexing report	80% or more of valuable pages indexed (a Victorious audit target)
Crawl errors	Whether Google can reach your pages	Search Console Crawl Stats and Page indexing reports	Green host status and no sustained drop in crawl requests
Mobile friendliness	Whether the mobile version holds the same content as desktop	Lighthouse, URL Inspection tool	Same content, structured data, and robots meta tags on both versions
Site health score	A crawler’s roll-up of the errors it found	Semrush Site Audit, Ahrefs Site Audit	No universal target, so track the trend

1. Page Load Speed

Faster pages give visitors a better experience, which helps you attract and keep website traffic. Google groups the measurements that matter most for page experience into Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The passing values are under How To Check Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights below.

In audits, we also hold sites to a server response time (time to first byte, or TTFB) under one second, which is a Victorious audit target. Some technical optimizations that can help speed up your site include:

• Using fast hosting.
• Adopting a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
• Minimizing HTTP requests.
• Using a single CSS stylesheet instead of multiple stylesheets or in-line styles.
• Optimizing images so they’re as small as possible without sacrificing resolution.
• Compressing web pages.
• Reducing redirects.
• Minifying your site’s code to remove excess indentations, spaces, or line breaks.

Not sure how to measure site speed? Check out our piece on PageSpeed Insights vs Lighthouse.

2. Pages Indexed

Your content isn’t visible in search until it’s been indexed by search engines. Checking on which pages have been indexed will help you spot potential technical issues that might make it difficult (or impossible) for Google to find the pages you want to appear in search results. You can use the page indexing report in Google Search Console to track which pages have been indexed (more on that under Indexed Pages below).

Keep in mind that you might not want all of the pages on your site to be indexed. For instance, if your site has thin or duplicate content, you might want to use canonical tags to point to the pages you do want indexed. You’ll also want to prune low-performing content periodically since index bloat can eat up your crawl budget and reduce your site’s overall search performance.

Google’s documentation says most sites have at least a few unindexed pages, so the goal is to get your important pages indexed. A sudden drop in the indexed count is the signal to investigate.

For example, a JavaScript rendering error was limiting Google’s ability to index key homepage content when Lonestar Challenge Coins came to Victorious. Fixing it was one part of an engagement that also included resolving keyword cannibalization, launching new landing pages, and building bottom-of-funnel content. Over the full engagement, monthly organic conversions rose 142% and organic sessions rose 66%.

3. Crawl Errors

When a search engine tries to reach a page on your website but fails, it will produce a crawl error. Crawl errors can result from either site errors or URL errors. Site errors include server errors, DNS errors, and mistakes in your robots.txt file. URL errors include 404s or conflicting information, such as submitting a noindex page for indexing.

A page Google can’t fetch can’t be indexed, and Google’s Crawl Stats documentation says Googlebot throttles back its requests when a site responds slowly. Check your server health and the reports under Crawl Errors below.

4. Mobile Friendliness

Mobile friendliness is whether your pages work as well on a phone as they do on a desktop. Google uses the mobile version of your content for ranking and indexing, which is called mobile-first indexing. So, if your site isn’t mobile-optimized, your search visibility is going to suffer.

Google’s mobile-first documentation asks for the same content, structured data, and robots meta tags on both versions of a page. Google has retired the Mobile-Friendly Test and Search Console’s Mobile Usability report, so compare the two versions with Lighthouse or the URL Inspection tool instead.

5. Site Health Score

A site health score is a single number a crawling tool gives you, roughly the share of crawled URLs it finds free of errors. Each tool calculates its own, and Google publishes none.

Google’s guidance on third-party SEO tools notes that these tools don’t have access to Google’s internal ranking data, so read a health score as that tool’s opinion of your site. Treat it as a trend line. Watch whether it climbs after you fix issues, and don’t compare scores across tools.

6. Performance Metrics That Point to Technical Problems

Although not technical metrics themselves, the following metrics can point to technical issues that you might otherwise be unaware of.

If you see inexplicable dips in:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• Average click-through rate
• Position and average position in search results

Check to see if there are technical issues to blame for a dive in these performance metrics. Since June 2025, the totals in Search Console’s Performance report also include AI Mode activity, so a shift in impressions or position doesn’t always mean a technical fault. Check the technical reports below before you assume one.

How To Track Technical Metrics Using Google Tools

You can use Google Search Console to create reports on core technical SEO KPIs, such as Core Web Vitals, indexed pages, and indexing errors. Use these reports to prioritize improvements that can help optimize your site for search. 

If you need a step-by-step guide on how to set up Google Search Console, we’ve got you covered.

Once you’ve got Google Search Console set up, you’re ready to monitor your site’s technical performance.

1. Indexed Pages

Google Search Console’s page indexing report shows which pages have been indexed, as well as any issues Google may have encountered while indexing your website.

To access, navigate to the ‘Indexing’ section of the menu and click ‘Pages.’ Learn how to mitigate errors here. If the indexed count drops, the report’s “Why pages aren’t indexed” table lists the reasons. See Pages Indexed above for what a healthy count looks like.

If your site has fewer than 500 pages, you can look up which pages Google has indexed by typing “site:your_site” in the search bar, where “your_site” is your homepage URL minus the “HTTPS://” or “HTTP://” prefix. The search results will automatically display all pages that Google has indexed on your site.

If you want to find specific pages, you can do that by adding relevant search terms after the domain, such as site:victoriousseo.com “SEO Content Services.”

2. Crawl Errors

To check your website for internal errors:

Log in to Search Console and click on ‘Settings’ on the navigation on the left.

Click on ‘Open report’ next to ‘Crawl stats.’

You can now see how many requests Google has made. If you click on ‘Host status’ you can get more detailed information if issues exist.

The report shows four measures. Total crawl requests is how often Google fetched your pages, total download size is how much data it downloaded, average response time is how quickly your server answered, and host status shows whether Google ran into availability problems, which should read green.

A sudden, sustained drop in crawl requests or a rise in response time is the cue to check your robots.txt file, your server logs, and any recent site changes.

3. How To Check Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights scans the content of a page, reports its Core Web Vitals, Google’s three measures of loading, responsiveness, and visual stability, and generates suggestions on how to make that page faster. A page passes when it meets the “good” value for all three at the 75th percentile of page loads:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading. Good is 2.5 seconds or less, and poor is more than 4.0 seconds.
2. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness. Good is 200 milliseconds or less, and poor is more than 500 milliseconds.
3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability, meaning how much content jumps around as the page loads. Good is 0.1 or less, and poor is more than 0.25.

Values between good and poor need improvement. PageSpeed Insights also reports diagnostics such as First Contentful Paint, which is useful for tracing a slow LCP but isn’t a Core Web Vital. Google recommends good Core Web Vitals for success in Search.

Learn more about Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse and how to optimize page speed here.

Which Technical SEO Issue Should You Fix First?

Fix whatever issue stops search engines from reaching your pages before you fix what makes them faster. We score every technical finding by its impact and the effort to fix it. Problems that block crawling or indexing come first, such as server errors, pages blocked by robots.txt, or key pages missing from the index, because no speed improvement helps a page Google can’t index.

After that, weigh each remaining issue, such as a Core Web Vitals problem on a high-traffic page, by the traffic it touches against the work to fix it.

The quick fixes below sit at the low-effort end of the same scale.

3 Quick Technical Fixes To Improve SEO 

Some simple technical fixes improve search visibility and a site’s bottom line, even though visitors rarely notice them.

1. Use SSL

A Secure Sockets Layer or SSL creates an encrypted connection between a server and a browser. In August 2014, Google announced it was starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal and described it then as a very lightweight one.

2. Create an XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that makes the job of search engines easier by telling them exactly where every page on your website is as they crawl it. The file also contains information about each page, such as modifications and updates. Learn how to upload an XML sitemap with Google Search Console.

3. Find and Fix Broken Links and Images

Broken links and images create dead ends for visitors and crawlers, and the 404 pages behind them show up as URL errors in the reports above. I recommend SEO Minion, a free Chrome extension, to easily find broken links that need to be fixed.

QiPoint’s website update broke its backlinks and created duplicate pages. We fixed the broken links and duplicate content first and worked on keyword optimization alongside them. Across that QiPoint engagement, goal completions rose 188% and conversion rate rose 197%. Trial downloads doubled in the second month. 

Do You Need Help With Technical SEO?

Many marketers shy away from technical SEO because it seems like a heavy lift to get familiar with the metrics and address any issues they might uncover. Look for an SEO agency that takes the time to get under the hood of your site and make recommendations for improvements.

A proactive partner will know to look for minor improvements that could have an outsized impact on your search performance, and will be completely transparent with you about everything they do in service to your SEO goals.

We start every SEO campaign with an SEO audit to catch any technical barriers that stand in the way of search success. For clients with limited in-house support, we also offer implementation services to make sure your site is free from technical issues that could impact your digital marketing efforts. Reach out today for a free consultation and learn more about the power of having an SEO partner you can trust.

Technical SEO Metrics FAQs