You’ve written great content. You’ve built some backlinks. But your rankings aren’t improving — or worse, they’re declining. Before you blame your content strategy or start paying for more links, check your technical SEO. These are the invisible issues that prevent search engines from properly crawling, indexing, and ranking your pages.
Technical SEO isn’t glamorous, but it’s the foundation everything else is built on. Fix these five issues and you’ll often see ranking improvements within weeks.
1. Fix your Core Web Vitals
Google has made Core Web Vitals an explicit ranking factor. These three metrics measure the real-world user experience of your pages.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures how long it takes for the largest visible element — usually a hero image or heading — to fully render. Google wants this under 2.5 seconds, but aiming for under 1.5 seconds puts you ahead of most competitors.
Common fixes include compressing and properly sizing images, using modern formats like WebP or AVIF, implementing lazy loading for below-the-fold images, and eliminating render-blocking CSS or JavaScript that delays the main content from appearing.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures how much your page content shifts around as it loads. If elements jump positions — pushing text down when an ad loads, or shifting buttons when a font file arrives — that’s a poor CLS score.
Fix it by always specifying width and height attributes on images and video elements, preloading custom fonts to prevent layout shift when they swap in, reserving space for dynamically loaded content, and avoiding inserting content above existing content after the page has started rendering.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
INP replaced First Input Delay in 2024 as the responsiveness metric. It measures how quickly your page responds to user interactions — clicks, taps, key presses.
Poor INP is usually caused by heavy JavaScript execution blocking the main thread. Reduce it by breaking up long-running scripts, deferring non-critical JavaScript, and removing unnecessary third-party scripts.
2. Implement structured data markup
Structured data (JSON-LD) tells Google exactly what your content is — whether it’s an article, a product, a local business, an FAQ, or a service. Without it, Google has to guess. With it, you’re eligible for rich results — those enhanced search listings with star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs, and other visual enhancements that dramatically improve click-through rates.
At minimum, implement Organization schema on your home page with your company name, logo, and social profiles. Add LocalBusiness schema on your contact page with addresses and opening hours. Use Article schema on every blog post with author, publication date, and headline. Add BreadcrumbList schema on every inner page for navigational breadcrumbs in search results.
Test your implementation with Google’s Rich Results Test tool — it shows you exactly what Google sees and flags any errors.
3. Fix crawl errors and broken links
Every 404 error, redirect chain, or broken link is a signal to Google that your site isn’t well maintained. More importantly, crawl errors waste your crawl budget — the limited number of pages Google will crawl on your site in any given period.
Open Google Search Console and check the Pages report under Indexing. Fix every page showing “Not found (404)” that should exist. Resolve redirect chains — any URL that redirects to another URL that redirects again should point directly to the final destination. Check for broken internal links using a crawler tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs Site Audit.
4. Optimise your XML sitemap
Your XML sitemap is the roadmap you give to search engines. A misconfigured sitemap can actively harm your SEO by pointing Google to pages you don’t want indexed, including pages that return errors, or omitting pages you do want indexed.
Your sitemap should include only canonical, indexable pages — no redirects, no 404s, no pages with noindex tags. It should be automatically generated so it stays current as you add or remove pages. It should be submitted to Google Search Console so Google knows where to find it. And it should be referenced in your robots.txt file.
If you’re using a static-site generator like Astro, the sitemap plugin handles this automatically. If you’re on WordPress, a plugin like Yoast or Rank Math generates it for you — but verify the output manually.
5. Ensure mobile-first indexing works properly
Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking — not the desktop version. If your mobile experience is degraded compared to desktop — missing content, broken layouts, unreadable text — your rankings will suffer even if the desktop version is perfect.
Check that all content visible on desktop is also visible on mobile. Ensure text is readable without pinching or zooming — a minimum 16px base font size. Verify that interactive elements like buttons and links have adequate spacing for touch targets. Confirm that structured data and meta tags are present in the mobile HTML, not just the desktop version. Test with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool and the mobile view in Lighthouse.
Start with the foundations
These five fixes address the technical foundation of your SEO. They won’t require new content, won’t require new backlinks, and won’t require months of waiting. Many of them produce measurable ranking improvements within 2-4 weeks of implementation because you’re removing obstacles that were actively holding your site back.
If you’re unsure where to start, run a Lighthouse audit on your most important pages. The report will highlight exactly which of these issues affect your site and how severely.
Want a professional technical SEO audit? Talk to our team — we’ll identify every issue and build a prioritised fix plan.
