Most SEO problems aren’t mysterious. They’re the same dozen issues appearing on site after site, quietly suppressing rankings while marketing teams pour budget into content and links. Here’s the checklist we run through on every audit.
1. Slow Core Web Vitals on Mobile
Google uses mobile-first indexing. Your desktop CWV score is largely irrelevant. Check your Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift specifically on mobile in Google Search Console. LCP above 4 seconds is a ranking drag. Fix: compress images, defer non-critical JS, use a CDN.
2. Duplicate Content Without Canonical Tags
E-commerce sites are especially prone to this — product pages accessible via multiple URL paths, filtered pages being indexed, print-friendly versions getting crawled. Audit your canonical tags and ensure every duplicate URL points to the preferred version.
3. Crawl Budget Waste on Faceted Navigation
If Googlebot is spending its crawl budget on hundreds of filter combinations (colour=red&size=medium&sort=price), it’s not crawling your important pages. Noindex or nofollow faceted URLs that don’t have unique ranking potential.
4. Orphaned Pages
Pages with no internal links pointing to them. Google can find them via sitemap, but they receive no PageRank. Run a crawl, identify pages with zero internal links, and add them to relevant navigation or content clusters.
5. Missing or Broken Structured Data
Schema markup for articles, products, FAQs and reviews enables rich results. Validate your structured data in Google’s Rich Results Test. Broken JSON-LD is unfortunately common, especially after CMS updates.
6. Redirect Chains
A → B → C → D costs crawl budget and dilutes link equity. Audit your redirects and update all A → B → C chains to point directly to the final destination.
7. Thin or Auto-Generated Pages Being Indexed
Tag archives, author pages with one post, category pages with three items, location pages with no unique content. These create a long tail of low-quality indexed URLs that drag down site quality signals. Noindex them.
8. Inconsistent Internal Linking to Key Pages
Your most important pages should receive the most internal links from contextually relevant content. Map your internal linking to your priority pages — there’s almost always a mismatch between what the business considers important and what the link graph reflects.
9. No HTTPS or Mixed Content Issues
HTTPS is table stakes. Mixed content (HTTP resources loaded on an HTTPS page) causes browser warnings and signals. Check with a crawler and fix all insecure resource references.
10. Hreflang Errors on Multi-Region Sites
If you have separate URLs for different countries or languages, hreflang must be implemented correctly in both directions. Incorrect hreflang is one of the most common issues on international sites and causes significant visibility problems.
11. XML Sitemap Including Non-Canonical URLs
Your sitemap should only include URLs you want Google to index — no noindex pages, no redirects, no canonicals pointing elsewhere. Audit the sitemap quarterly.
12. JavaScript-Rendered Content Not Being Indexed
If critical content (especially navigation or main body text) is rendered client-side via JavaScript, Google may not index it. Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to see what Google actually sees when it crawls your pages. If the rendered HTML is missing content present in the browser, you have a JS indexing problem.
