What are common technical SEO problems found in audits?
Crawling and Indexing Issues
Search engines may be blocked by robots.txt or meta robots tags, preventing pages from being indexed. Broken links (404 errors) and redirect chains waste crawl budget and frustrate users.
Duplicate content without canonical tags can cause the wrong page to rank. XML sitemap errors, like including noindex pages, also confuse search engines.
- Accidental noindex or robots.txt blocks
- Broken internal and external links
- Redirect chains and loops
- Duplicate content without canonicals
- XML sitemap errors
Page Speed and Mobile Issues
Slow-loading pages hurt user experience and rankings. Common causes include unoptimized images, excessive JavaScript, and cheap hosting. Core Web Vitals failures are frequent.
Mobile usability problems like tiny text, clickable elements too close together, and horizontal scrolling are common. Google uses mobile-first indexing, so these are critical.
On-Page and Security Issues
Missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, multiple H1s, and thin content are frequent. HTTPS is a confirmed ranking signal, yet some sites still lack SSL certificates.
Structured data errors can prevent rich snippets. Also, check for mixed content (HTTP resources on HTTPS pages) which triggers browser warnings.
Common mistakes
- Assuming a site is technically perfect because it looks fine to visitors—many issues are invisible to the eye.
- Ignoring mobile-specific problems, which can severely impact rankings due to mobile-first indexing.
- Overlooking the impact of slow page speed on both rankings and conversions.