Technical SEO has a reputation for being an endless list of small corrections. In practice, a handful of issues account for most of the damage on most sites. Here is the order we work through them, and why each one matters.
Start with what search engines can reach
Before anything else, confirm that crawlers can find, crawl and index the pages you care about. A brilliant page blocked in robots.txt earns nothing.
- Check robots.txt for rules that block important directories or resources such as CSS and JavaScript.
- Review the index coverage report in Search Console for pages excluded by noindex, canonicals or crawl errors.
- Make sure your XML sitemap lists only canonical, indexable URLs.
- Fix redirect chains and loops; every extra hop wastes crawl budget and leaks a little authority.
Then fix duplication
Duplicate and near-duplicate pages force search engines to choose which version to rank, and they rarely choose the one you would. This is one of the most common problems we find on sites built with page builders or migrated from an older design.
- Set a self-referencing canonical tag on every page.
- Consolidate pages targeting the same query rather than letting them compete.
- Control faceted navigation and URL parameters so filter combinations do not generate thousands of thin URLs.
- Make sure only one version of your site resolves: one protocol, one hostname, one trailing-slash convention.
Make the structure obvious
Internal linking is the most under-used technical lever available to most teams. It tells search engines which pages matter and what they are about, and it costs nothing but attention.
- Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage.
- Link between related pages using descriptive anchor text rather than generic phrases.
- Remove or redirect orphan pages that nothing links to.
Then performance
Core Web Vitals are not the largest ranking factor, but they are a genuine one, and they affect conversion regardless of rankings. Focus on the largest contentful paint first: it is usually a hero image or a render-blocking stylesheet.
- Serve images in a modern format such as WebP or AVIF, sized to their display dimensions.
- Defer non-critical JavaScript and inline only the CSS needed for the first screen.
- Use font-display swap and self-host fonts in WOFF2 rather than TTF.
- Enable page caching and compression at the server level before reaching for plugins.
Finish with structured data
Schema markup does not directly raise rankings, but it helps search engines understand entities and can earn richer results. Mark up your organization, your services, your articles and any FAQs, then validate them, because invalid markup is worse than none.
How to prioritise
Work in the order above. Crawling and indexing problems block everything downstream, duplication wastes the authority you already have, and performance work is easier to justify once the foundations are sound.