Why technical SEO comes first
You can write the best content on the internet, but if search engines struggle to crawl, render or understand your site, it will never reach its potential. Technical SEO is the foundation everything else sits on, and it is often where the fastest wins are hiding.
When we audit a site, it is common to find pages blocked from indexing, slow templates, duplicate URLs competing with each other and missing structured data. Fixing these issues does not require new content. It simply lets your existing pages compete properly.
1. Make sure the right pages are indexed
Open Google Search Console and look at the Pages report. Check which URLs are indexed and why others are excluded. Common problems include stray noindex tags, canonical tags pointing to the wrong page and important pages missing from your XML sitemap.
Your goal is simple: every valuable page should be indexable and listed in the sitemap, and every low-value page (filters, internal search results, thin tag pages) should be kept out.
2. Fix Core Web Vitals
Speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor. Focus on three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (how fast the main content appears), Interaction to Next Paint (how responsive the page feels) and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the layout jumps).
The biggest wins usually come from compressing and correctly sizing images, serving modern formats like WebP or AVIF, deferring non-critical scripts and removing unused apps or plugins.
3. Clean up duplicate content
Duplicate pages split your ranking signals. Use one canonical URL for each piece of content, redirect old versions with 301 redirects and make sure HTTP, HTTPS, www and non-www versions all resolve to a single address.
4. Strengthen internal linking
Internal links tell search engines which pages matter most. Link from high-authority pages, such as your home page and popular articles, to the service and product pages you want to rank. Use descriptive anchor text rather than “click here”.
5. Add structured data
Schema markup helps search engines understand your business, services, products, articles and FAQs. It can also make you eligible for rich results. Only mark up content that is visible on the page, and validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test.
How to prioritise your fixes
You will rarely have time to fix everything at once. Sort issues by two questions: how many important pages does this affect, and how hard is it to fix? Start with problems that block indexing, because a page that isn’t indexed can’t rank at all. Then move to template-level speed problems, since one fix can improve hundreds of pages. Leave small one-off warnings for last.
After each change, watch Google Search Console for a few weeks. Technical improvements take time to be recrawled, so measure indexed pages, impressions and clicks over a month or more rather than day to day.
The bottom line
Technical SEO is rarely glamorous, but it compounds. Fix the foundations first, then build content and links on top of them. Our SEO service covers all of this. If you would like a prioritised list of fixes for your site, request a free audit and we will send you a short video walkthrough.