From the Host: Jeremy Rivera on Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the area where I’ve seen the most overconfident beginners and the most humble experts. The practitioners who’ve spent years doing real technical audit work — enterprise crawls, Core Web Vitals triage, international hreflang implementations — all say the same thing: the majority of sites have the same small set of issues, and fixing those first is almost always more valuable than chasing the newest technical factor. The guests on this page are the people I call when I have a technical question I can’t answer confidently myself. They’ve collectively diagnosed more SEO problems than most practitioners will see in a career.
“Algorithm updates are just turning the dials on factor importance. If you go down, it’s because you’re incomplete — you optimized for the factors that were currently tuned up, and when they changed the dials, you didn’t have the rest.”
— Ernesto Ortiz, SEO practitioner
Why Technical SEO Is Still the Foundation
Every new SEO channel, every algorithm shift, every AI-driven change in how search works — all of it builds on a foundation that starts with the same question: can search engines find, crawl, index, and understand your content? Technical SEO answers that question. Without it, everything else is building on sand.
The guests on this page approach technical SEO from different angles — forensic auditing, enterprise scale, mobile-first optimization, Core Web Vitals, video, and WordPress performance. Together they cover every layer of technical practice that matters in 2025, from the fundamentals that haven’t changed to the emerging technical factors that are just beginning to matter.
Episodes on Technical SEO
Technical SEO That Actually Matters with Kev Wiles
Kev Wiles — Enterprise SEO Consultant
Kev’s framework for which technical fixes actually move rankings — and how to prioritize an audit backlog when you can’t do everything at once — is the most practically useful technical SEO guidance I’ve featured. His ability to separate meaningful technical work from agency busywork is a skill most practitioners take years to develop, and he explains exactly how he does it.
Mastering Technical SEO: Insider Strategies with Kristina Azarenko
Kristina Azarenko — Technical SEO Specialist
Kristina’s insider strategies separate maintainable technical SEO from the kind that creates new problems every time you fix the old ones. Her approach to building technical SEO systems that stay fixed — rather than audits that need to be redone every quarter — is the kind of operational expertise that agencies rarely document and clients rarely ask for until it’s too late.
Forensic SEO & the Deep Dive into Google with Kristine Schachinger
Kristine Schachinger — Forensic SEO Consultant
Kristine has recovered sites from Google penalties that other consultants couldn’t explain. Her forensic approach to technical SEO — identifying the patterns inside penalty recoveries that reveal how Google actually evaluates pages — produces insights you won’t find in any published guideline. What core updates are actually targeting, and why most audits miss the thing that actually matters, are the questions she’s best positioned to answer.
Scaling Enterprise SEO with Martin MacDonald
Martin MacDonald — Former Head of SEO, Paddy Power
Martin’s experience running SEO at Paddy Power — one of the most competitive verticals online — produced battle-tested frameworks for what enterprise SEO really looks like at scale. His most important insight: SEO success at enterprise isn’t a knowledge problem, it’s an implementation problem. The systems that make large programs work and actually get things done are what separates the teams that move the needle from the ones that produce slides.
Laura Lee: Enterprise SEO, Leveraging SME Expertise & Cross-Functional Collaboration
Laura Lee | 17+ years including time at WebMD and major enterprise brands
Laura’s tenure at WebMD — one of the highest-stakes SEO environments in healthcare — gave her hard-won expertise in what actually moves the needle in complex SEO environments where content, technical, and stakeholder management all collide. Her frameworks for leveraging subject matter experts and navigating cross-functional collaboration are essential for anyone doing enterprise SEO where you don’t control the content calendar.
UX & SEO Merge: Jesse McDonald on Search Experience Optimization
Jesse McDonald — Senior SEO Director, Siege Media
Jesse makes the case that the line between UX and SEO has blurred beyond the point where you can optimize them separately and expect good results. His “search experience optimization” framework — treating the user’s on-page experience as a ranking factor rather than an afterthought — is where the discipline is heading, and Siege Media’s results prove it works.
The Evolution of Mobile Search Marketing with Cindy Krum
Cindy Krum — Mobile SEO Pioneer
Cindy was thinking about mobile search as a primary surface before most of the industry took it seriously, and her work since then has shaped how practitioners understand mobile-first indexing and the ongoing evolution of how search is consumed on devices. Her perspective on what practitioners still get wrong about optimizing for mobile is both technically grounded and practically urgent.
SEO for Fun & Profit with Scott Hendison
Scott Hendison — Founder, Search Commander | 20+ years in SEO
Scott’s 20+ years in SEO have given him the rarest combination in the industry: deep technical expertise and the ability to explain it in terms clients and business owners actually understand. His practical client advice — focused on sustainable technical improvements rather than chasing algorithm changes — is the kind of grounded, long-view thinking that produces compounding results.
Stories of a Fractional Enterprise SEO with Ash Nallawalla
Ash Nallawalla — Fractional Enterprise SEO Consultant & Author of Accidental SEO Manager
Ash’s fractional model for enterprise SEO consulting — embedding expertise into large organizations without the full-time hire — is increasingly how enterprise SEO gets done. His book and practice document what the day-to-day of enterprise technical SEO actually looks like from the inside, with the honest account of what works and what the job requires that the industry rarely publishes.
Video SEO & WordPress Optimization: Anthony Prichard & Paritosh Pareek
Anthony Prichard & Paritosh Pareek — WP Sprints
The WP Sprints team covers two technical areas that most SEOs treat as afterthoughts: video SEO strategy and WordPress back-end performance. Their case that the back end of your site matters more than most practitioners realize — and the specific performance factors that move the needle in WordPress specifically — makes this one of the most practically useful technical episodes for the majority of SEO practitioners working in WordPress environments.
Bootstrapping a Technical SEO Tool with Julia & Serge from JetOctopus
Julia & Serge — CEO & CTO, JetOctopus
The founders of one of the most capable technical SEO crawlers on the market share what it took to build and scale a bootstrapped product in a category dominated by well-funded incumbents. Their product-side perspective on technical SEO — seeing patterns across thousands of crawls — produces insights about what’s most commonly broken and most impactful to fix that no individual SEO consultant could accumulate.
Jeremy’s Key Takeaways: Technical SEO
- Fix the common issues first. Crawlability, indexation, site speed, mobile rendering, internal linking — the majority of sites have the same small set of high-impact technical problems. Solving those before chasing advanced tactics is almost always the right call.
- Technical SEO is an implementation problem, not a knowledge problem. At enterprise scale especially, knowing what needs to be fixed is rarely the bottleneck. Getting dev to prioritize and implement it is. Build relationships with engineering early.
- Forensic analysis before recommendations. The most common technical SEO mistake is prescribing solutions before understanding the specific cause. What looks like a duplicate content issue is often a crawl budget problem. What looks like a speed issue is often a hosting issue. Diagnose first.
- UX and technical SEO have merged. Core Web Vitals made it official, but the trend predates them. Technical performance that degrades user experience is now a direct ranking liability. Treat the two disciplines as integrated.
- Mobile-first isn’t a trend — it’s the default. Google’s index is mobile-first. If your site doesn’t perform on mobile, your technical SEO priorities are wrong. Full stop.
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