Start with what’s actually indexed
Before touching speed scores, answer one question: is Google indexing the pages that make you money, and ignoring the ones that don’t? Most sites have it backwards, thin, duplicate, and faceted URLs flooding the index while key commercial pages sit in “Discovered, not indexed.”
Pull the Pages report in Search Console, segment by template, and you’ll usually find the single highest-leverage fix on the whole site within an hour.
Stop wasting crawl budget
On large sites, crawl efficiency is rankings. Every URL a bot wastes on a sorted, filtered, or session-ID variant is a URL it isn’t spending on your money pages.
- Block infinite faceted combinations in robots.txt and with parameter handling.
- Return clean 404/410s instead of soft-404 “no results” pages.
- Keep your XML sitemaps to canonical, indexable URLs only, no redirects, no noindex.
Fix internal linking before you build links
Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever you own, and the most neglected. They distribute authority, define which pages matter, and help Google understand topical relationships.
We’ve moved pages from page three to the top five with internal linking alone, no new content, no new backlinks.
Audit orphan pages, add contextual links from your strongest URLs to your priority targets, and make sure your most important pages are no more than a couple of clicks from the homepage.
Core Web Vitals: fix LCP, ignore the vanity score
Chasing a green PageSpeed number is a distraction. Chasing real-world Largest Contentful Paint on mobile is not. Focus the work where users and rankings actually feel it:
- Serve a properly sized, modern-format hero image and preload it.
- Eliminate render-blocking scripts and the layout shift they cause.
- Watch field data in the Core Web Vitals report, not lab scores.
Optimize the metric your visitors experience (field LCP), not the lab score that flatters your dashboard.
Schema that earns real estate
Structured data won’t rank you on its own, but the right types win richer results and more clicks, and increasingly feed AI answer engines. Prioritize the schema that maps to your business: Product and Review for stores, LocalBusiness for service areas, Article and FAQ for content.
Validate it, keep it consistent with on-page content, and don’t mark up things that aren’t visible to users.
The fix only counts when it ships
The hardest part of technical SEO isn’t the audit, it’s getting changes deployed. A 200-item audit that sits in a backlog is worth nothing. We’d rather ship the nine fixes above this quarter than hand you a document that impresses and then dies.
If your audit is collecting dust, our technical SEO team can implement directly or hand your engineers fully-scoped tickets.