When people say SEO, they think content; yet content rises on top of a technical base. The education sites we have managed for a long time — among them matematikbitmistir.com, one of Turkey's notable private math tutoring sites — double as a technical SEO laboratory for us. In this article we describe five jobs we actually carried out on those sites, measured, and saw deliver results.
1) The Icon Font Trap: Turning 130 KB into 6 Lines
Most websites load a complete 130–142 KB icon font in order to display 4–6 small icons. In other words, you are carrying an entire alphabet to use two letters. We threw those fonts out and converted each icon actually in use into an inline SVG, one by one. The result was measurable: the main site's Google PageSpeed mobile score went from 84 to 95. Not from this change alone, of course — but it was the single largest line item.
2) Redirect Chains: Collapsing 479 Rules to a Single Hop
Every page that changes its address over the years leaves a redirect behind. The problem nobody notices is this: when a server-level rule and an application-level rule stack on top of each other, every redirect ends up taking two hops. Google does not like two-hop redirects; each extra hop eats into crawl budget. By fixing the order in which the rules were processed, we brought all 479 redirects down to a single hop.
3) Duplicate Content Leaks
The same content opening under two separate addresses cuts its ranking power in half. In our audits we caught two sneaky examples: double-slash URLs (//page/) were serving the homepage with a 200 status code, and /index.php was returning the same content as the root address. Both were closed off with permanent redirects. Leaks of this kind never raise a red alert in any tool — they take manual auditing to find.
4) Schema Markup: Explaining to Google with Structure, Not Sentences
Course information on lesson pages, question-and-answer structure on FAQ sections, Article markup on blog posts — all of it is marked up with structured data (schema.org). This earns rich results in search, and it is also the precondition for AI search (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews) understanding the content correctly. On top of that, we publish llms.txt files for AI crawlers.
5) Measurement: Continuous Monitoring via the Search Console API
If you are not measuring the work, you have not done the work. Search performance for these sites is pulled regularly through the Search Console API: which keyword is climbing, which page earns impressions but no clicks, which piece of content is due for an update — decisions rest on raw data, not on a report. For rank tracking, real search results are checked separately as well.
Who Needs This Playbook?
Anyone with a website who says "we keep writing content, but the rankings never come". Our experience is this: on most sites in that situation, the problem is not the content — it is the technical base. Until speed, redirect hygiene, duplicate content and schema are fixed, investment in content keeps underperforming.
If you want the same audit for your site, take a look at our SEO service; you can see what the scope would cost in the price calculator. On the speed side, the "Speed Optimisation (PageSpeed 90+)" item in the calculator covers exactly the work described in this article.
