Technical SEO factors are the infrastructure elements that determine whether search engines can access, understand, and rank your pages efficiently. These sit underneath your content and links—if your technical foundation is broken, even great content won't rank. The core factors break into a few categories. Crawlability covers your robots.txt, XML sitemaps, internal linking structure, and whether bots can actually reach your pages. Indexability means Google can store and retrieve your pages—issues here include noindex tags, canonicalization problems, duplicate content, and thin pages. Site speed and Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) directly impact rankings since 2021, especially on mobile. A site loading in 5+ seconds will bleed traffic regardless of content quality. Mobile-friendliness is non-negotiable since Google's mobile-first indexing. Your mobile version is what gets ranked, so responsive design, tap targets, and viewport configuration all matter. HTTPS is a confirmed ranking signal and a trust factor—migrating from HTTP to HTTPS typically takes 2-4 weeks if done correctly with proper 301 redirects. Structured data (Schema markup) helps Google understand your content type—products, reviews, recipes, events—and can unlock rich results that increase CTR by 20-40%. Other factors include URL structure (clean, descriptive URLs perform better), proper use of hreflang for multi-language sites, image optimization (file size, alt text, modern formats like WebP), and server/hosting reliability. Log file analysis shows what Google is actually crawling versus what you think it's crawling—we routinely find clients wasting 60-70% of their crawl budget on junk pages. At Ottawa SEO, we audit technical factors first because they're the highest-leverage fixes. A client with 15,000 pages had 11,000 soft-404s burning crawl budget—cleaning that up lifted organic traffic 40% in eight weeks without touching content. Technical SEO is about removing friction. Content and links get you in the game, but technical factors determine whether you actually get to play.