You can write the best article on the internet, but if your developers implement it badly, Google will not reward it. For women running UK businesses, that is not an abstract problem. Women in Business: Key UK Facts shows that women-led firms are a major force in the economy: the 2019 Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship found that women-led SMEs contribute around £105 billion to the UK economy, while the British Business Bank’s 2024 UK VC Investment Landscape report found that all-female founder teams still receive less than 2% of UK equity investment. With limited external funding, organic search is often the most cost-effective growth channel, which makes technical SEO a commercial priority.
The Federation of Small Businesses’ 2024 estimate puts the UK small business population at 5.5 million, and many rely on freelancers or agencies for both content and development. Use these six technical SEO tips for writers to brief those developers properly and protect your content before it goes live.
Six technical SEO tips for writers
Tip 1: Reject intrusive JavaScript pop-ups
Pop-ups, especially those triggered by JavaScript, increase Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), one of Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics. Google’s Search Central documentation states that a good CLS score is 0.1 or less. A pop-up that shoves the page around as it loads can push you above that threshold and damage rankings.
Under UK rules, pop-ups also interact badly with the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR) and UK GDPR consent requirements. If a pop-up fires before a user has managed cookie preferences, you risk a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Ask your developer to use fixed banners in the sidebar or bottom of the page instead. They pitch your lead magnet without blocking the content or shifting the layout.
Tip 2: Forbid hidden content
Hidden content happens when developers tuck text behind tabs, accordions, or display: none rules. Google can crawl some hidden content, but it may not weight it as highly as visible text. Worse, if the same content appears twice on the page, it can be treated as duplicate content.
For UK business sites, hidden content also creates accessibility risks under the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 if you supply public-sector clients. Screen readers and search crawlers both prefer content that is visible by default.
Insist that body copy, headings, and key calls to action are rendered in the HTML without relying on user interaction to reveal them.
Tip 3: Canonicalise dynamic URLs properly
E-commerce sites often generate dynamic URLs for filters, colours, sizes, or sorting. Google can crawl these, but if every variant is indexed, the search engine sees thin or duplicate pages and may not rank any of them well.
The fix is a canonical tag that points to the primary version of the page. If you sell a handbag in three colours, the colour swatches should stay on one URL, or each colour should canonicalise back to the main product page. According to ONS retail sales data from 2024, online sales account for roughly one quarter of all UK retail spending, so getting product pages right has a direct revenue impact.
Also ask your developer to write unique titles and H1s for any paginated or filtered pages that genuinely need their own URLs.
Tip 4: Set up hreflang for UK and international audiences
If you serve more than one English-speaking market, hreflang tags tell Google which version of a page is for which country. Without them, Google may show your US page to UK searchers, or vice versa, confusing readers and wasting traffic.
For example, if you have separate pages for /gb/ and /ie/ audiences, the hreflang annotations should make that clear. This matters for UK exporters: getting the wrong currency, shipping terms, or VAT information in front of a buyer is an immediate conversion killer.
Do not attempt to code hreflang yourself. Your job is to specify the market and language for each page, then audit the developer’s implementation with a tool such as Google Search Console or a dedicated hreflang checker.
Tip 5: Ban automatic geo-redirects
Automatic geo-redirects send a user from one country version of a page to another based on IP address. The problems are obvious: the user may have wanted the original page, the redirect adds server load, and it can break Google’s crawling because Googlebot often crawls from US IPs.
Google’s guidance is clear: use hreflang and let users choose their market with a visible country or currency selector. If you have already implemented hreflang correctly, searchers will usually land on the right page anyway.
Tip 6: Stop developers over-engineering the page
Developers sometimes add heavy animations, custom JavaScript apps, or elaborate CSS transitions to prove their value. The result is slower pages and worse Interaction to Next Paint (INP), the Core Web Vital that replaced First Input Delay in March 2024. Google defines a good INP score as 200 milliseconds or less.
For a small UK business, every extra second of load time costs conversions. Ofcom’s Online Nation 2024 report found that 96% of UK adults own a smartphone, and mobile accounts for the majority of UK web traffic. Keep animations minimal, defer non-critical JavaScript, and test the final page in Google PageSpeed Insights before sign-off.
Action steps for your next content brief
- Add a technical SEO checklist to your content brief covering pop-ups, hidden content, dynamic URLs, hreflang, geo-redirects, and page speed.
- Ask for Core Web Vitals scores (LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, INP of 200 ms or less, CLS of 0.1 or less) before any page goes live.
- Audit a sample of product or service pages in Google Search Console every month.
- Read Is SEO Dead? How the Landscape of Search is Changing and Building a Brand in Competitive Digital Markets for more on growing your digital presence.
Conclusion: guard your content against developer mistakes
Your content deserves to be found. These six technical SEO tips for writers give you the language to challenge bad development decisions before they cost you rankings. Brief clearly, audit ruthlessly, and treat technical SEO as part of the writing process, not an afterthought.
