Key takeaways
- A 200-issue audit is noise. The win is the five or six fixes that actually move rankings.
- Indexation hygiene first - get junk pages out of the index before anything else.
- Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever you own, and you need nobody's permission to use them.
- Chase INP, not a green Lighthouse score. It is the metric tied to real frustration.
A technical audit that lists 200 issues is easy to produce and almost useless. Nobody ships 200 fixes. The skill is knowing which five or six actually change anything.
Here is where I start on most sites.
Indexation hygiene#
Pull every URL Google has indexed and look for what should not be there: filtered listing pages, old campaign URLs, staging leftovers, tag archives with one post. Every junk page in the index spreads your authority thinner and gives the crawler more low-value work.
Decide per page: keep, redirect, or noindex. Then check the index again in a few weeks. This one fix often does more than anything else.
Internal linking#
Most sites point all their authority at the homepage and a contact page, and starve the pages that should rank. Find your money pages. Check how many internal links point at them, and from where. Usually the answer is "not enough, and not from anywhere useful".
Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever you own. You do not need anyone's permission to use them.
The Core Web Vital that matters#
Stop chasing a green Lighthouse score. Look at INP - how fast the page responds when someone actually taps or clicks. It is the metric tied to real frustration, and it is the one most sites fail on mobile.
Fix the slow interaction, not the lab number.
Kill the thin and duplicate pages#
Two pages targeting the same thing compete with each other, and neither wins. Near-duplicate location pages, thin service pages, blog posts that say the same thing - merge them into one strong page and redirect the rest.
Fewer, better pages beats more pages. It has for years.
Redirects, done properly#
Every site migration leaves a trail of broken redirects, chains, and 302s that should be 301s. Crawl the site, find them, fix them. It is dull and it works.
The point#
None of this is clever. It is a short list of fixes that consistently move rankings, done in an order that means the early wins fund the rest. That is what a managed SEO engagement actually looks like - not a 200-line spreadsheet nobody opens twice.
Frequently asked
How many fixes should a technical SEO audit actually recommend?
Does internal linking still work?
Which Core Web Vital matters most?
Are thin and duplicate pages still worth fixing?
