Technical SEO isn’t optional in 2025. Learn how to boost crawl efficiency, and future-proof your site for LLMs and AI-powered search.


Carolyn ShelbyJuly 9, 2025
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For all the noise around keywords, content strategy, and AI-generated summaries, technical SEO still determines whether your content gets seen in the first place.

You can have the most brilliant blog post or perfectly phrased product page, but if your site architecture looks like an episode of “Hoarders” or your crawl budget is wasted on junk pages, you’re invisible.

So, let’s talk about technical SEO – not as an audit checklist, but as a growth lever.

If you’re still treating it like a one-time setup or a background task for your dev team, you’re leaving visibility (and revenue) on the table.

This isn’t about obsessing over Lighthouse scores or chasing 100s in Core Web Vitals. It’s about making your site easier for search engines to crawl, parse, and prioritize, especially as AI transforms how discovery works.

Crawl Efficiency Is Your SEO Infrastructure

Before we talk tactics, let’s align on a key truth: Your site’s crawl efficiency determines how much of your content gets indexed, updated, and ranked.

Crawl efficiency is equal to how well search engines can access and process the pages that actually matter.

The longer your site’s been around, the more likely it’s accumulated detritus – outdated pages, redirect chains, orphaned content, bloated JavaScript, pagination issues, parameter duplicates, and entire subfolders that no longer serve a purpose. Every one of these gets in Googlebot’s way.

Improving crawl efficiency doesn’t mean “getting more crawled.” It means helping search engines waste less time on garbage so they can focus on what matters.
Technical SEO Areas That Actually Move The Needle

Let’s skip the obvious stuff and get into what’s actually working in 2025, shall we?
1. Optimize For Discovery, Not “Flatness”

There’s a long-standing myth that search engines prefer flat architecture. Let’s be clear: Search engines prefer accessible architecture, not shallow architecture.

A deep, well-organized structure doesn’t hurt your rankings. It helps everything else work better.

Logical nesting supports crawl efficiency, elegant redirects, and robots.txt rules, and makes life significantly easier when it comes to content maintenance, analytics, and reporting.

Fix it: Focus on internal discoverability.

If a critical page is five clicks away from your homepage, that’s the problem, not whether the URL lives at /products/widgets/ or /docs/api/v2/authentication.

Use curated hubs, cross-linking, and HTML sitemaps to elevate key pages. But resist flattening everything into the root – that’s not helping anyone.

Example: A product page like /products/waterproof-jackets/mens/blue-mountain-parkas provides clear topical context, simplifies redirects, and enables smarter segmentation in analytics.

By contrast, dumping everything into the root turns Google Analytics 4 analysis into a nightmare.

Want to measure how your documentation is performing? That’s easy if it all lives under /documentation/. Nearly impossible if it’s scattered across flat, ungrouped URLs.

Pro tip: For blogs, I prefer categories or topical tags in the URL (e.g., /blog/technical-seo/structured-data-guide) instead of timestamps.

Dated URLs make content look stale – even if it’s fresh – and provide no value in understanding performance by topic or theme.

In short: organized ≠ buried. Smart nesting supports clarity, crawlability, and conversion tracking. Flattening everything for the sake of myth-based SEO advice just creates chaos.
2. Eliminate Crawl Waste

Google has a crawl budget for every site. The bigger and more complex your site, the more likely you’re wasting that budget on low-value URLs.