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Most technical SEO advice is a waste of time. Not because it's wrong, but because it treats every issue as equally urgent. You end up fixing things that don't matter while the real problems quietly drain your traffic.
This isn't about perfection. It's about identifying the handful of technical issues that actually hurt your rankings and fixing them before they cost you more customers. If you're running a business, you don't have time to chase every minor warning in a site audit. You need to know what moves the needle.
The fixes below are ranked by impact, not complexity. Some take an hour. Some take a day. All of them will improve your visibility if you're currently getting them wrong. If you need expert guidance implementing these strategies, Seogrowth specialises in technical SEO that delivers measurable results.
Technical SEO has a credibility problem. Every audit tool spits out hundreds of warnings. Most of them don't matter.
You'll see alerts about missing alt text on decorative images, minor HTML validation errors, or pages that load in 2.1 seconds instead of 2.0. These issues exist, but they're not costing you rankings. They're noise.
The real problems are structural. Redirect chains that slow crawling. Duplicate content confusing Google about which page to rank. Broken internal links that waste crawl budget. These issues compound over time, and most businesses don't notice until traffic drops.
The difference between useful technical SEO and busywork is simple: does fixing this issue change how Google crawls, indexes, or ranks your site? If not, it can wait.
Redirect chains happen when one URL redirects to another, which redirects to another. They're common after site migrations, URL structure changes, or when someone "fixes" a redirect by adding another redirect on top.
Google follows redirects, but it doesn't follow them forever. Long chains slow down crawling, waste your crawl budget, and dilute link equity. Worse, they frustrate users who notice the delay.
Every redirect adds latency. A single redirect might add 200 milliseconds. A chain of three or four can add a full second before the page even starts loading.
That's a problem for mobile users on slower connections. It's also a problem for Google, which allocates a finite crawl budget to your site. If Googlebot wastes time following redirect chains, it crawls fewer of your actual pages.
Link equity also degrades slightly with each redirect. One redirect is fine. Three or four in a row means you're losing ranking power for no reason.
Run a crawl of your site using any decent crawler. Look for redirect chains longer than two hops. You'll usually find them in old blog posts, archived category pages, or URLs that have been restructured multiple times.
Fix them by updating the first redirect to point directly to the final destination. If example.com/old redirects to example.com/newer, which redirects to example.com/newest, change the first redirect to go straight to example.com/newest.
Check your internal links too. If you're linking to URLs that redirect, update those links to point directly to the final destination. This eliminates unnecessary redirects for both users and crawlers.
Duplicate content doesn't trigger a penalty, but it does create confusion. When Google finds multiple pages with similar content, it has to choose which one to rank. It doesn't always choose the one you want.
This is especially common on ecommerce sites, where product variations create near-identical pages, or on blogs with tag archives that duplicate post content.
Canonical tags tell Google which version of a page is the "real" one. The problem is that most sites either don't use them, use them incorrectly, or use them inconsistently.
The most common mistake is self-referencing canonicals that point to the wrong URL. If your page is at example.com/page but the canonical tag points to example.com/page?ref=123, you've just told Google the wrong page is the original.
Another issue is missing canonicals on paginated content. If you have a blog archive split across multiple pages, each page should canonicalise to itself, not to page one. Otherwise, Google might not index pages two, three, and beyond.
First, check your URL parameters. If example.com/product and example.com/product?colour=blue show the same content, you need canonicals or parameter handling in Google Search Console.
Second, look at your HTTPS and HTTP versions. If both versions are accessible and neither redirects, Google sees them as separate pages. Same goes for www and non-www versions.
Third, check your print-friendly or AMP versions. If these pages are indexable and don't have proper canonicals, they're competing with your main content.
Your XML sitemap should be a curated list of pages you want Google to index. Instead, most sitemaps are bloated messes that include everything: redirects, noindexed pages, low-value archives, and pages that haven't been updated in years.
Google doesn't need a sitemap to find your pages. It needs a sitemap to understand which pages matter.
A sitemap with 10,000 URLs sends a signal: all of these pages are equally important. That's rarely true. Most sites have a core set of high-value pages and a long tail of low-value or outdated content.
When your sitemap includes everything, Google has to decide what to prioritise. It might crawl pages you don't care about while ignoring pages that actually drive revenue.
Worse, if your sitemap includes redirects, 404s, or noindexed pages, Google starts to distrust it. A sitemap full of errors is worse than no sitemap at all.
Include your homepage, key service or product pages, high-traffic blog posts, and any pages that are hard to reach through internal navigation. That's it.
Exclude tag archives, author pages, search result pages, and anything with a noindex tag. Exclude redirects and 404s. Exclude pages that haven't been updated in over a year unless they still drive traffic.
Keep your sitemap under 1,000 URLs if possible. If you have more, split it into multiple sitemaps organised by content type or priority.
Page speed matters, but not in the way most people think. Google's Core Web Vitals are useful, but they're not the whole story. What actually matters is whether your site feels fast to users.
A site can score perfectly on Core Web Vitals and still feel sluggish. Conversely, a site with mediocre scores can feel snappy if the right elements load quickly.
Core Web Vitals are measured using field data from real users, but the data is global. If most of your traffic comes from Australian cities with fast broadband, your real-world performance might be better than your CWV score suggests.
The opposite is also true. If you serve customers in regional areas with slower connections, your CWV score might look fine while actual users struggle.
The bigger issue is that CWV focuses on specific metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. These matter, but they don't capture everything. A site can have a fast LCP but still feel slow if secondary content takes forever to load.
Here's a simpler test: can a user see your main content and interact with your site within three seconds on a mobile device? If yes, you're fine. If no, you have a problem.
This isn't about hitting a perfect score. It's about eliminating the delays that frustrate users. Slow server response times, render-blocking scripts, and oversized images are the usual culprits.
Test your site on a real mobile device using a throttled connection. If it feels slow to you, it feels slow to your customers. Fix the obvious problems first: compress images, defer non-critical JavaScript, and use a faster host if your server response time is over 600 milliseconds.
Schema markup helps Google understand your content and display rich results in search. The problem is that most schema types don't generate rich results, and even when they do, the impact on click-through rates is inconsistent.
You don't need schema on every page. You need it on pages where rich results actually improve visibility.
First, use Product schema on ecommerce pages. This enables star ratings, price, and availability in search results. It works, and it drives clicks.
Second, use FAQ schema on pages with genuine frequently asked questions. This can trigger expandable FAQ boxes in search results, which take up more space and push competitors down.
Third, use Local Business schema if you have a physical location. This improves your chances of appearing in local search results and Google Maps.
Everything else is optional. Article schema, Breadcrumb schema, and Organisation schema are fine to add, but they rarely generate visible rich results. Don't waste time on them unless you've already handled the basics.
Most content management systems have plugins or built-in tools for adding schema. If you're on WordPress, use a plugin. If you're on Shopify, it's already included for products.
For custom implementations, use Google's Structured Data Markup Helper. It generates the code for you. Copy it into your page's HTML, test it using Google's Rich Results Test, and you're done.
If you're not comfortable editing HTML, this is one area where it's worth getting help. Working with specialists like Seogrowth can ensure your schema is implemented correctly and actually delivers results.
Broken internal links are one of the easiest technical SEO issues to fix, yet they're everywhere. They happen when you delete a page, change a URL, or migrate to a new platform without updating your links.
Every broken link is a dead end for users and crawlers. Enough of them, and Google starts to question the quality of your site.
Broken internal links waste crawl budget. When Googlebot hits a 404, it's spent time crawling a page that doesn't exist. That's time it could have spent crawling pages that matter.
They also break the flow of link equity. If you have a high-authority page linking to a 404, that link equity goes nowhere. You're losing ranking power for no reason.
Users notice too. A broken link signals neglect. If your site feels abandoned, users leave. Bounce rates increase, and Google interprets that as a quality signal.
Use a crawler to scan your site for broken internal links. Most tools will flag 404s, 301s, and 302s. Focus on the 404s first.
Fix them by either restoring the deleted page, redirecting the old URL to a relevant replacement, or removing the link entirely. If the linked page was low-value, just remove the link. If it was important, redirect it.
Check your navigation menus and footer links too. These appear on every page, so a broken link in your footer means hundreds or thousands of broken links across your site.
HTTPS is table stakes. If your site isn't using HTTPS, fix that first. But HTTPS alone doesn't make your site secure, and Google checks for more than just a padlock icon.
Mixed content errors and missing security headers are common issues that undermine your site's security and trustworthiness.
Mixed content happens when your site uses HTTPS, but some resources (images, scripts, stylesheets) are loaded over HTTP. Browsers flag this as insecure, and Google downgrades your site's security status.
This usually happens after migrating to HTTPS. You've updated your main URLs, but some hardcoded links in your content or templates still point to HTTP versions.
Check your browser console for mixed content warnings. Fix them by updating the URLs to use HTTPS or by using protocol-relative URLs (//example.com/image.jpg instead of http://example.com/image.jpg).
Security headers are HTTP response headers that tell browsers how to handle your site's content. Google doesn't rank sites based on security headers, but they do contribute to overall site trustworthiness.
The most important ones are Content-Security-Policy, X-Content-Type-Options, and Strict-Transport-Security. These prevent common attacks like cross-site scripting and clickjacking.
Most hosting providers let you add security headers through your control panel or .htaccess file. If you're not sure how to implement them, check your host's documentation or ask your developer.
Technical SEO isn't about fixing everything. It's about fixing the things that matter.
Start with redirect chains and broken links. These are quick wins that improve crawling and user experience. Then tackle duplicate content and sitemap bloat. These take more time but have a bigger impact on indexing.
Speed and schema are important, but they're not urgent unless you're actively losing traffic. Security is non-negotiable, but if you're already on HTTPS, the remaining issues are lower priority.
Track your progress. Monitor your crawl stats in Google Search Console. Watch for changes in indexed pages, crawl errors, and Core Web Vitals. If a fix doesn't move the needle within a month, it probably wasn't the right priority.
If you're unsure where to start or need expert help implementing these fixes, Seogrowth can audit your site and prioritise the issues that will actually improve your rankings. Technical SEO is about making smart choices, not chasing perfection.
