Every week I run into the same story: a business owner has been publishing blog posts and building backlinks for months, and their rankings barely move. The problem usually isn’t the content strategy. It’s technical issues under the hood that are quietly capping how well the site can perform.
Here are the five fixes I check first on almost every technical SEO audit, in order of how often they actually move the needle.
1. Fix your Core Web Vitals
Google uses page experience signals, largely driven by Core Web Vitals, as a ranking factor. A slow Largest Contentful Paint or unexpected layout shifts don’t just hurt conversions, they hurt visibility.
The trap is assuming a fast server means a fast site. On this site the server returned the HTML in 10 milliseconds and first paint still took 3.3 seconds, because a stylesheet on someone else’s domain had to be fetched before anything could render. Here’s the full diagnosis, including what it did and did not fix.
2. Get your structured data right
Schema markup doesn’t directly boost rankings, but it determines whether you’re eligible for rich results, star ratings, FAQ dropdowns and business information in the knowledge panel, all of which move click-through rate.
Wrong schema is worse than missing schema, because it is confidently wrong. Rossi Real Estate was marked up with generic Person and Organization types that said nothing about the business, and replacing them with RealEstateAgent gave search engines something to work with. This site had its own version of that mistake: it declared it served the United States, from a business in Cavite. Nobody notices these until someone reads the markup. This is part of what I cover in on-page and local SEO work.
3. Clean up duplicate and thin content
Auto-generated tag pages, near-duplicate location pages, and thin category archives dilute your site’s authority. Search engines have to guess which version matters.
Thin does not only mean short. A page can run a thousand words and still say nothing a visitor could not get elsewhere, and a two hundred word page that answers one question completely can outrank it. The test I use is whether the page says something that could only come from this business — a number someone measured, a decision someone made and can explain. If it could have been written about any company in the industry, it is thin regardless of length.
4. Make sure your site is actually crawlable
I still find sites where important pages are accidentally blocked in robots.txt, missing from the sitemap, or buried five clicks deep in the navigation.
The most common version is quieter than an outright block. A site I built has a robots.txt that politely tells Google where to find its sitemap, and that URL returns a 404. Nothing is broken from the outside. Every page loads. But the one file whose entire job is to hand search engines a list of what exists is not there, and nobody would ever notice from looking at the site.
5. Fix mobile usability issues
With mobile-first indexing, Google evaluates your mobile experience first. Tap targets that are too small, text that requires zooming, or content that shifts unexpectedly on mobile all count against you, even if your desktop site looks perfect.
Horizontal scrolling is the one worth checking by hand, because it is completely objective: at a given width, the page is either wider than the screen or it is not. It usually comes from one element with a fixed width and no maximum — a logo, a table, a long unbroken line of text — and it usually hides at widths nobody thought to test, between the two sizes everyone does.
If you’re not sure which of these apply to your site, that’s exactly what a technical audit is for. Get a free audit and I’ll show you exactly where you stand.