01 SEO TECHNIQUE · GUGUBRAND PLAYBOOK
Before content or links matter, search engines have to crawl, render, and index your site cleanly. This is the layer most small-business sites silently fail.
TECHNIQUE 01
Duplicate URLs (http vs https, www vs non-www, trailing-slash variants, query strings) split your ranking signals across copies of the same page. Pick one canonical form and force it at the server level with 301s, not with JavaScript.
Run curl -I against the http://, www, and no-slash variants of your homepage. Each should answer with a single 301 straight to the canonical URL — no chains.
TECHNIQUE 02
A sitemap is a promise to crawlers: these URLs exist, they answer 200, and they are worth indexing. Sitemaps with 404s, redirects, or noindexed pages teach Google to ignore yours.
Regenerate sitemap.xml on every deploy and spot-check 10 random URLs from it monthly — every one should return 200 and a canonical tag pointing to itself.
TECHNIQUE 03
A missing page must answer 404, not 200 with an error layout (a soft 404). Soft 404s poison the index with junk URLs and burn crawl budget that should go to real pages.
In Google Search Console, open Pages → Not indexed and look for the Soft 404 bucket. Anything listed there needs a true 404/410 or a 301 to a real equivalent.
TECHNIQUE 04
Core Web Vitals are a tiebreaker, not the whole game — but slow pages lose users before ranking even matters. The biggest wins are boring: compress images, preload the hero asset, cache static files at the edge.
Set cache headers by file class: HTML no-cache, hashed JS/CSS immutable for a year, images for 30 days. Then test LCP on a mid-range phone over 4G, not on your laptop.
TECHNIQUE 05
If your content only appears after client-side JavaScript runs, you are betting your visibility on a second, delayed indexing pass — and AI crawlers mostly do not execute JavaScript at all. Server-render or statically export anything you want discovered.
Run curl against your key pages and grep for your main headline. If it is not in the raw HTML, neither Google's first pass nor any AI engine can see it.
TECHNIQUE 06
Every hop in a redirect chain leaks crawl budget and slows users. Chains usually accumulate silently: http → https → www → final URL is three hops for one page view.
Crawl your site with a tool like Screaming Frog (or a script) and flag any URL that takes more than one hop to resolve. Collapse them to single 301s at the origin.
Weekly for the Pages (indexing) report and after every deploy for Coverage spikes. Indexing problems compound quietly — a monthly glance is too slow to catch a bad deploy before it spreads through the index.
They are a tiebreaker among pages with comparable relevance, not a primary factor. Fix them for conversion first — faster pages close more leads — and treat any ranking lift as a bonus.
We build the brand, encode it as an AI skill, and run the SEO and GEO playbook with AI agents — bilingual EN/ES, measured monthly.
Book a fit call