Technical SEO is the foundation. Without it, great content and backlinks cannot save your rankings.
Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) are measurable ranking signals. Sites that score "Good" on all three perform meaningfully better in mobile search than sites that score "Poor".
In my experience, the majority of Singapore business websites have zero structured data installed, missing a free opportunity to stand out in search results.
Mobile-first indexing means Google judges your site by its mobile version. A desktop-only focus is ranking suicide.
Most technical SEO fixes take under a day to implement but can unlock months of stalled ranking potential.
Picture a company with 80+ blog articles and strong backlinks, stuck on page 3 for every keyword that matters. The content is not the problem. The backlinks are not the problem. The technical foundation is broken.
In scenarios like this, the diagnosis is usually quick. The content quality is fine. The backlink profile is healthy. But the technical infrastructure underneath it all is failing.
Fixing technical foundations commonly produces dramatic ranking improvements. Same content, same backlinks. The only thing that changes is the invisible infrastructure underneath.
I am going to walk you through exactly what technical SEO is, why it matters more than most Singapore businesses realise, and give you a checklist you can run on your own site today. But first, you need to understand what sits beneath every page Google decides to rank.
What Is Technical SEO?
Think of your website like a building. Your content is the interior design. Your backlinks are the reputation of the neighbourhood. But technical SEO is the foundation, the plumbing, and the electrical wiring. If the foundation has cracks, it does not matter how beautiful the furniture is. The building is not safe to occupy.
Technical SEO covers everything that helps search engines find, crawl, render, and index your pages correctly. It includes site speed, mobile responsiveness, URL structure, schema markup, XML sitemaps, robots.txt configuration, HTTPS security, and how your internal linking guides Google through your site.
Most of this is invisible to your visitors. They will never see your sitemap or your robots.txt file. But Google sees all of it, and it uses that information to decide whether your pages deserve to rank.
Tyler Ang
Digital Marketing Consultant
After consulting with 255+ businesses, Tyler discovered most do not need more traffic. They need someone to look at their business properly first. He built sportifate.com to 6,800+ organic users with zero ad spend, proving the research-first system works.
Every month you run ads, post content, or pay for SEO without knowing what is actually working is another month of budget leaking, and in one conversation I can pull up your Google Ads, Search Console, and Analytics to show you exactly where the hole is and which underutilised areas deserve your attention first.
What you get from a 30-minute strategy call:
Full Platform Audit
A full breakdown of your current numbers across Google Ads, Meta, Search Console, and Analytics, showing where your money is going, what it is returning, and which underutilised areas could produce results faster
Biggest Constraint
The single biggest constraint holding your business back right now, identified from your actual platform data rather than guesswork
Why Technical SEO Matters
Stop reading for a second and pull up your website on your phone. Tap around. Does it feel fast? Does every page load in under 3 seconds? Is every button easy to tap with your thumb? If you hesitated on any of those questions, you have a technical SEO problem that is actively costing you rankings right now.
Singapore has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, at around 97% per Statista (2024). Your customers are searching on mobile. Google knows this, which is why they switched to mobile-first indexing years ago. That means Google judges your entire site based on the mobile version, not the desktop version you probably spend most of your time looking at.
The Singapore market adds another layer of complexity. With a small geographic area but intense competition across industries like F&B, healthcare, legal services, and e-commerce, the margin between ranking on page 1 and page 2 is razor thin. When two competing businesses have equally good content, technical SEO is the tiebreaker.
Google has made this explicit: site speed is a ranking factor. Not a vague signal. A measurable, testable factor that you can check right now at PageSpeed Insights.
Core Web Vitals are the three metrics Google uses to judge your site experience. They are not optional suggestions. They are graded thresholds, and your site either passes or fails.
Core Web Vitals benchmarks that Google uses to evaluate your site
Metric
What It Measures
Good
Needs Improvement
Poor
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
How fast main content loads
< 2.5s
2.5s - 4.0s
> 4.0s
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
How fast page responds to clicks
< 200ms
200ms - 500ms
> 500ms
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)
How much page layout jumps around
< 0.1
0.1 - 0.25
> 0.25
A study by Google found that sites scoring "Good" on all three Core Web Vitals metrics rank 24% higher on average than sites that fail even one metric. That is not a marginal difference. That is the difference between page 1 and page 2 for competitive Singapore keywords.
The most common speed killers I see on Singapore business websites are uncompressed images (a single hero image can add 3+ seconds to load time), render-blocking JavaScript from third-party tools like chat widgets and analytics scripts, and no browser caching configured for static assets.
Mobile-First Indexing
If you are still designing your website desktop-first and then "making it responsive," you are doing it backwards. Google does not care about your desktop site anymore.
Mobile-first indexing means Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. This has been the default for all new websites since 2019, and Google completed the switch for all sites in 2023. There is no opt-out.
What does this mean practically? If your mobile site is missing content that exists on desktop, Google will not see that content. If your mobile navigation hides important pages behind too many taps, Google may not crawl them. If your mobile page loads slowly because of oversized assets, your rankings suffer even if desktop loads fine.
I see this constantly with Singapore businesses that built their websites 3 to 5 years ago. The desktop version looks professional. But the mobile version has tiny text, buttons that are too close together, horizontal scrolling on certain pages, and pop-ups that cover the entire screen. Every one of these issues is a ranking signal telling Google your site provides a poor experience.
Crawlability and Indexing
This is the part of technical SEO that sounds boring but determines whether Google can even find your pages. You could have the best content in Singapore, but if Google cannot crawl and index it, that content is invisible.
What Google Needs to Crawl Your Site
A clean XML sitemap submitted through Google Search Console that lists every important page on your site.
A robots.txt file that does not accidentally block important pages or entire directories. I have seen Singapore agencies deploy staging robots.txt files to production, blocking the entire site from Google for weeks.
A logical internal linking structure so Google can discover new pages by following links from existing ones. Orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them rarely get indexed.
Proper canonical tags telling Google which version of a page is the original when duplicate or similar content exists.
The fastest way to check your crawlability is to open Google Search Console, go to the Pages report, and look at the "Not indexed" section. If you see hundreds of pages listed there with reasons like "Discovered but not indexed" or "Crawled but not indexed," your site has a crawlability problem that is holding back your entire SEO effort.
A solid SEO consultant will audit your crawlability as the very first step, before touching content or backlinks. Because if Google cannot access your pages, nothing else matters.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data you add to your website code that tells Google exactly what your content means. Instead of Google guessing that your page is about a dental clinic in Orchard Road, schema markup explicitly declares it: this is a LocalBusiness, located at this address, with these opening hours, offering these services, with this average rating.
Here is the opportunity most Singapore businesses are missing: In my experience auditing Singapore business websites, the vast majority have zero structured data installed. That means implementing even basic schema markup puts you ahead of the vast majority of your competitors overnight.
The most valuable schema types for Singapore businesses are:
LocalBusiness schema: your name, address, phone number, opening hours, and service area. Essential for any business serving Singapore customers.
FAQ schema: turns your frequently asked questions into rich results that take up more space in search results. Free visibility.
Service schema: explicitly tells Google what services you offer, helping you match to service-related searches.
Review/Rating schema: displays star ratings directly in search results, dramatically improving click-through rates.
Breadcrumb schema: helps Google understand your site hierarchy and displays navigation paths in search results.
For businesses targeting local SEO in Singapore, schema markup is not optional. It is one of the strongest signals you can send to Google about your geographic relevance.
HTTPS and Security
This should be a non-issue in 2026, but I still encounter Singapore business websites running on HTTP without an SSL certificate. Google Chrome labels these sites as "Not Secure" in the browser bar. That label alone destroys trust before a visitor reads a single word on your page.
HTTPS has been a confirmed Google ranking signal since 2014. If your site is not on HTTPS, you are giving competitors a free ranking advantage. Most hosting providers offer free SSL certificates through Let's Encrypt. There is no technical or financial excuse for running an unsecured site.
Beyond the SSL certificate itself, security-related technical issues that affect SEO include mixed content warnings (loading HTTP resources on an HTTPS page), expired certificates, incorrect redirects from HTTP to HTTPS that create redirect chains, and missing security headers like HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security — a header that forces browsers to always load your site over HTTPS) that tell browsers to always use the secure version.
Technical SEO Audit Checklist
Grab a pen. Open your website in one tab and Google Search Console in another. Run through this list and check off each item. Anything you cannot check off is costing you rankings right now.
Speed and Performance
Mobile PageSpeed Insights score above 50 (aim for 80+).
LCP under 2.5 seconds on mobile.
INP under 200ms on mobile.
CLS under 0.1 on all pages.
Images compressed and served in WebP or AVIF format.
No render-blocking resources in the critical path (the JavaScript and CSS the browser needs before it can paint anything visible).
Mobile Usability
All text readable without zooming on a phone screen.
Tap targets (buttons, links) at least 48px apart.
No horizontal scrolling on any page.
No intrusive interstitials or pop-ups covering content.
Crawlability
XML sitemap submitted in Google Search Console and returns 200 status.
Robots.txt is not blocking important pages or directories.
No orphaned pages (every page has at least one internal link pointing to it).
Canonical tags set correctly on all pages.
Zero "Discovered but not indexed" pages in Search Console for important URLs.
Structured Data
LocalBusiness schema with accurate NAP (name, address, phone) data.
FAQ schema on pages with frequently asked questions.
Breadcrumb schema matching your site navigation.
All structured data passing Google Rich Results Test with zero errors.
Security
HTTPS active with valid, non-expired SSL certificate.
No mixed content warnings in browser console.
HTTP to HTTPS redirect working without chains (a single 301 redirect — a permanent server-side redirect that passes ranking signals through to the new URL).
HSTS header configured.
Ahrefs walks through a complete technical SEO audit step by step. Bookmark this and run it on your site.
The Bottom Line
The scenario from the beginning is not unusual. Sites stuck on page 3 despite strong content and backlinks almost always have a combination of these technical issues: slow load times, crawlability problems from misconfigured robots.txt or canonical tags, missing schema markup, and mobile rendering issues. Fix these, and the same content that was invisible suddenly ranks.
None of these issues are visible to someone browsing the site. The pages look fine. The content reads well. But underneath, the technical foundation is riddled with problems that tell Google: do not trust this site enough to put it on page 1.
The fixes often take days, not months. Not a six-figure budget. A few days of focused technical work. The results typically start showing within weeks, not months.
Technical SEO is not glamorous. Nobody posts about their XML sitemap on LinkedIn. But it is the foundation that every ranking is built on, and ignoring it is the most expensive mistake in SEO.
If you ran through the checklist above and found issues, that is actually good news. It means there is untapped ranking potential sitting in your site right now. A focused technical SEO audit can identify every issue and prioritise them by impact, so you fix what matters first.
Want to know what is holding your site back? Get in touch and I will run a free technical SEO check on your site. No pitch, just a clear list of what to fix and in what order.
