Technical SEO First: 10 Fixes to Make Before You Publish Another Page

When rankings stall, the instinct is to publish more. But content is only as visible as the site carrying it, and a surprising number of business websites are quietly held back by problems no amount of writing fixes. These ten checks take a day or two and should come before the next editorial calendar.

1. Confirm what is actually indexed

Search Console's page indexing report tells you which URLs Google has kept and why it dropped the rest. Look for pages excluded as duplicates, blocked by robots.txt, or marked noindex by mistake — a staging setting that survived a deployment is a classic. What you think is live and what Google has are often two different lists.

2. One version of every URL

http and https, www and non-www, trailing slash and none, uppercase and lowercase: each pair is a duplicate unless one redirects to the other. Pick a canonical form, redirect everything else to it with a 301, and set a canonical tag on every indexable page that points to itself.

3. Speed against the published targets

Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal and, more importantly, a bounce signal. Google's targets are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift below 0.1, measured on real visitors. Oversized images, render-blocking scripts and layout that shifts as fonts and images arrive are the usual culprits.

4. Server-render what should rank

If a page's main content only appears after JavaScript runs in the browser, you are relying on the search engine to execute it, and you will be crawled less often and indexed less completely. Anything you want found — copy, headings, product listings, blog posts — should be present in the HTML the server sends.

5. Titles and descriptions that are unique

A site where fifty pages share the title 'Home | Company Name' is telling search engines those pages are interchangeable. Every indexable page needs its own title that says what the page is about, and a description written for the person deciding whether to click.

6. One H1, a sensible heading order

Headings are the page's outline. One H1 that states the topic, H2s for the sections, H3s inside them. Using heading tags for visual size rather than structure — or skipping the H1 because the logo is 'the heading' — makes the page harder to understand for crawlers and screen readers alike.

7. Internal links with real anchor text

Pages that nothing links to are effectively invisible. Link related content to each other from within the copy, using words that describe the destination rather than 'click here'. Your navigation and footer count, but a link inside a relevant paragraph carries more meaning.

8. A sitemap that matches reality

Your XML sitemap should list every indexable page and nothing else — no redirects, no 404s, no noindexed pages. Generate it from the same source of truth as the site so it cannot drift, and resubmit it after any structural change.

9. Structured data you can stand behind

Schema markup helps search engines understand a page, and it earns rich results when the content genuinely qualifies. Mark up what is on the page: your organisation, your articles, your FAQs if you show them. Do not add review or rating markup for reviews you do not display — it violates the guidelines and can cost you rich results you were entitled to.

10. Mobile parity

Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If the phone layout hides sections, trims copy, or drops internal links that the desktop layout shows, the indexed page is the poorer one. Check that the mobile page carries the same content, just laid out differently.

Technical SEO is not a ranking trick. It is removing the reasons a search engine has for not trusting a page you have already paid to create.