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- March 24, 2025
Technical SEO is more than just fixing errors and improving page speed. It is about scaling. A website that works well today might not hold up as it grows. More content, more traffic, and expanding into new markets all introduce complexity. If SEO infrastructure is not built for scale, growth leads to inefficiencies, lost rankings, and missed opportunities.
I like to compare it to SimCity. In the early game, building a small town is easy. You need a few roads, power lines, and some zoning. But as the city expands, new challenges emerge – traffic congestion, power shortages, and unhappy residents. If infrastructure does not keep up, the city grinds to a halt.
Websites experience the same growing pains. A small business website with a few pages might perform well, but if it expands to thousands of pages, serves multiple regions, or grows its product catalog, technical SEO becomes the backbone that keeps it functioning. Without the right systems in place, things start to break.
SimCity players quickly learn that poor planning leads to disaster. If roads are placed haphazardly, traffic clogs up the streets. If power grids are not upgraded, parts of the city lose electricity. Websites experience similar issues when SEO infrastructure is not designed to scale.
A ten-page website can get away with simple navigation, but once a site grows to thousands of pages, internal linking, crawl efficiency, and content discoverability become critical. Search engines need clear pathways to navigate a site, just like a city needs well-planned roads and highways to function.
Internal linking acts as the road network, guiding search engines to important pages. XML sitemaps serve as the city grid, making sure key locations are easy to find. Pagination and category structures are like public transport, helping users and crawlers move through content efficiently.
A lack of planning in SimCity results in endless congestion and frustrated citizens. A lack of structure in SEO leads to wasted crawl budget, orphaned pages, and poor indexation.
As a city grows, basic two-lane roads no longer cut it. Highways, express lanes, and metro systems are needed to keep traffic moving. Websites require the same level of planning when it comes to crawling and indexing.
A small blog with a few hundred pages does not struggle with search engine crawlers. But a large ecommerce site or global publisher with millions of URLs will.
Search engines have a limited crawl budget. They will not check every page if they think some are not worth it. A chaotic site structure is like a poorly designed city, bottlenecks form, and key areas are ignored.
This is where crawling strategies matter. When dealing with millions of pages, relying on default crawling methods is not enough. Some sites have WAF protections that block SEO crawlers. Instead of forcing a standard crawl that gets rejected, I slow the crawl down, mimic real user behaviour, and adjust request rates to bypass restrictions. It might take days to complete, but at least it works.
SimCity punishes players who try to expand without upgrading their roads. SEO punishes websites that expand without optimising their Googlebot crawling infrastructure.
As a SimCity population grows, basic services like fire stations and hospitals are no longer enough. A well-planned city needs automated solutions like public transport and traffic management to function efficiently.
SEO needs automation too. A site with hundreds of thousands of product pages or blog posts cannot afford to do things manually.
Metadata, structured data, and hreflang tags need to be dynamically generated. If a company expands into multiple languages and regions, adding hreflang tags by hand is unsustainable. Just like SimCity players automate power distribution and emergency response, SEO teams must automate multi-language tagging, internal linking, and structured data implementation to scale globally.
Without this, international SEO becomes a mess. A UK-based ecommerce site expanding into France and Germany without hreflang could end up with the wrong language version ranking in search results. This is like a SimCity player placing a police station in an industrial district while crime runs wild in the residential zones.
In SimCity, expanding a city without proper zoning and infrastructure planning leads to major disruptions. Expanding a website without considering SEO implications has the same effect.
Businesses often launch redesigns, migrate to new CMS platforms, or expand into new international markets without planning for the SEO impact.
A poor site migration is like bulldozing half your SimCity layout and expecting everything to work fine afterward. Without the right redirects, structured data, and technical adjustments, search engines struggle to understand the changes. Traffic drops, rankings collapse, and recovery can take months.
Similarly, businesses entering new markets often assume they can duplicate their existing website and translate the content. Without proper hreflang setup, Google may rank the wrong language version in different regions. Imagine building a subway system in SimCity but failing to connect it to the city’s busiest areas. It does not work because the infrastructure does not support real-world needs.
Expanding into multiple languages and currencies requires SEO that scales. Pricing needs to be formatted correctly for different regions, hreflang needs to be properly assigned, and content strategies need to be localised rather than simply translated.
In SimCity, building the wrong infrastructure forces expensive fixes later. In SEO, failing to plan for international growth leads to lost revenue and months of trying to clean up avoidable mistakes.
One of the biggest problems in SimCity is traffic congestion. As the city grows, roads that once worked fine become overloaded. Players have to upgrade to highways and introduce public transport to keep things moving.
Website performance works the same way. A site that loads in two seconds when it has 100 pages might slow to ten seconds with 100,000 pages.
A bloated, unoptimised site does not just frustrate users—it hurts rankings and conversions. Images need compression, JavaScript should be minimised, and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) must be in place to ensure fast load times globally.
Just like a SimCity player upgrades roads before traffic becomes a problem, websites should optimise for speed before performance issues hurt the business.
It is easy to assume scaling SEO is only relevant for big brands, but even small businesses need to plan for growth.
A startup with a simple blog might not worry about technical SEO today, but if they expand into new locations, add ecommerce functionality, or ramp up content production, they will need a scalable SEO foundation.
If SEO is not built for growth from the start, businesses will eventually hit walls such as crawl inefficiencies, poor performance, disorganised content, and international ranking issues.
Just like in SimCity, early planning prevents costly problems later. The best cities are the ones built with long-term vision, not just short-term fixes.
In SimCity, a small town with basic roads and power grids can function for a while, but without proper planning, growth leads to congestion, inefficiencies, and service failures. Websites follow the same pattern.
The best Technical SEO is not just about fixing today’s problems. It is about ensuring a website can scale without breaking, whether that means handling millions of URLs, expanding into new languages, or supporting increasing traffic demands.
SEO should be built with the future in mind. The worst time to fix scaling issues is when rankings have already dropped, traffic is suffering, and performance problems are hurting conversions. The best time is before those problems appear.
Just like the smartest SimCity players plan their cities before they expand, the smartest SEO strategies focus on scaling before it becomes an issue. Now go play Sim City!
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