What's the difference between technical SEO and on-page SEO?

Technical SEO is everything that affects how search engines crawl, render, and index your site — sitemap, robots, structured data, canonicals, hreflang, page speed, mobile-friendliness, redirects, internal linking architecture. It’s the floor. If technical SEO is broken, no amount of content fixes it.

On-page SEO is what’s on each individual page — title tag, H1, meta description, headings, body copy, image alt text, internal links to / from. It’s how you rank for a specific keyword once technical SEO has unlocked indexing.

Magento needs technical SEO first. Doing on-page work on a site with broken hreflang or no structured data is rearranging deck chairs.