Most businesses obsess over content and keywords while ignoring the technical foundation that determines whether any of that content can rank at all. Technical SEO is the back-end work that makes everything else possible, and when it breaks, rankings drop without warning. Here are five issues we find on almost every audit.
1. Slow Core Web Vitals
Googles Core Web Vitals measure the real-world loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability of your pages. They are a confirmed ranking factor, and most websites fail at least one of them.
The three metrics to watch:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): should fire in under 2.5 seconds. Slow LCP usually means oversized images or render-blocking JavaScript.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): should be under 200 milliseconds. Slow INP usually means heavy third-party scripts.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): should be under 0.1. High CLS usually means images without dimensions or ads loading after content.
Run your URL through PageSpeed Insights. If anything is red, you have work to do. The fix is usually some combination of image compression, lazy loading, script deferral, and server response time tuning.
2. Pages Blocked from Crawling or Indexing
The most painful technical SEO issue is the one nobody notices: pages you want ranked are blocked from being indexed. Common causes include a stray “noindex” tag left over from staging, a misconfigured robots.txt, or a canonical tag pointing to a different page.
Check your robots.txt file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for “Disallow” lines that block important paths. Then use Google Search Consoles URL Inspection tool to verify that your key pages are actually indexed. If Google cannot see your page, none of your content matters.
3. Broken Internal Links and Orphan Pages
Internal links pass authority between pages. Broken internal links waste that authority on 404 errors. Orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them) get crawled less frequently and rank worse, because Google takes them less seriously.
Run a crawl with Screaming Frog or a similar tool. Fix every broken internal link. Find every orphan page and either link to it from a relevant existing page or remove it. Both are quick wins that often produce ranking gains within weeks.
4. Missing or Broken Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data that tells search engines what your content is about. It is what turns plain blue search listings into rich results with star ratings, FAQ snippets, product information, and breadcrumbs.
Most sites either have no schema at all or have schema that fails validation. Both are missed opportunities. Implement schema for:
- Your organization or local business
- Each service or product page
- Articles and blog posts
- FAQ sections
- Reviews and ratings
- Breadcrumb trails
Validate every implementation with Googles Rich Results Test. Schema that fails validation does nothing.
5. Mobile Usability Failures
Google indexes mobile-first. If your site fails on mobile, it fails everywhere. Common mobile issues include touch targets too close together, text too small to read, content wider than the screen, and pop-ups that block content.
Check Google Search Consoles Mobile Usability report. Fix every error. Then load your site on an actual phone, not just a desktop emulator, and try to navigate every page. If anything frustrates you, it frustrates your users, and Googles algorithm notices.
What to Do Next
Technical SEO is the cheapest source of ranking gains because most of these issues are fixable in days, not months. They do not require new content, new links, or new investments. They just require finding what is broken and fixing it. If you are not sure where your site stands, schedule a free audit. We will run a full technical scan and deliver a prioritized fix list that shows you exactly what is holding your rankings back.
