Run a website through an SEO auditing tool and there’s a good chance it’ll come back with a list of things you’ve apparently done wrong. Missing alt text, redirect chains, duplicate titles, slow-loading pages, indexing warnings and a few hundred other things you probably didn’t realise were an issue. Even our website would flag a fair few of these.
Depending on the size of the website, you might end up with thousands of warnings. Some of them are genuinely important, while others are about as urgent as rearranging the stationery cupboard during a fire.
The challenge isn’t necessarily finding technical SEO issues. There are plenty of excellent tools that can do that. The real skill is knowing which ones are worth fixing, which can wait and which aren’t actually problems in the first place.
At Peaco Marketing, we approach technical SEO with one question in mind: what’s going to make the biggest difference to the business? What will actually get more money made quickly?
That might mean fixing a handful of broken redirects before tackling hundreds of missing image descriptions. It could mean prioritising a single important page that Google can’t index over thousands of low-value URLs flagged in a crawl. Sometimes, it means recommending that the business doesn’t spend any money fixing an issue at all.
Here’s how we approach prioritising technical SEO work, and why we don’t believe that a perfect audit score should be the goal.
Why Not All Technical SEO Issues Are Equal
Imagine taking your car to a mechanic for an inspection. They discover that your brakes are failing, one of your tyres needs replacing and there’s a small scratch on the passenger door.
All legitimate problems, but you’d probably question their judgement if they started polishing the scratch while ignoring the brakes.
Technical SEO works in much the same way. An issue’s existence doesn’t automatically tell us how important it is, and the severity assigned by an auditing tool doesn’t necessarily reflect the commercial impact on your website.
For example, a missing meta description is unlikely to be anywhere near as important as a service page accidentally marked as noindex. Both might appear in an SEO audit, but one could prevent a valuable page from appearing in search results entirely.
There’s also an important difference between a technical problem and something that’s simply been flagged because it doesn’t meet a tool’s preferred configuration. A website can have hundreds of non-indexed URLs and still be functioning exactly as intended.
Google makes this distinction in its own Page Indexing report documentation, explaining that website owners shouldn’t expect 100% of their URLs to be indexed. Duplicate URLs and deliberately excluded pages are perfectly normal.
Understanding that difference is where effective technical SEO begins.
Our Approach to Prioritising Technical SEO
We don’t believe in handing a client a spreadsheet containing 500 technical issues and expecting them to work through it from top to bottom. Aside from being overwhelming, it’s rarely a sensible use of their development budget.
Instead, we assess issues based on their likely impact, the scale of the problem and the effort required to resolve them. We also consider whether they’re actively damaging performance or simply creating a potential risk.
An issue affecting every service page on a website is obviously different from one affecting an old blog that hasn’t received a visitor in five years. Equally, a problem that takes ten minutes to resolve might be worth addressing immediately, even if its impact is relatively modest.
We generally separate technical SEO work into four priority levels.
Priority 1: Critical Issues That Need Immediate Attention
These are the issues that can prevent search engines from accessing important content, disrupt existing traffic or make the website unusable for potential customers.
Examples include a website accidentally blocked from indexing, widespread server errors, broken redirects following a migration or important content becoming inaccessible because of rendering problems.
If an established website suddenly loses a substantial proportion of its organic traffic, we’d investigate whether one of these issues is responsible before worrying about smaller optimisation opportunities.
The important distinction is that not every 404 error or indexing warning falls into this category. A broken URL receiving valuable traffic and backlinks deserves a different level of attention from an obsolete page that nobody visits.
Our rule: If an issue is actively preventing important pages from being accessed, indexed or used, it moves to the front of the queue.
Priority 2: High-Impact Issues Affecting Commercial Performance
These aren’t necessarily emergencies, but they’re problems that could be limiting the performance of pages that matter to the business.
Imagine an e-commerce website where product pages contain incorrect canonical tags, causing Google to favour the wrong URLs. Alternatively, a service-based business might have important landing pages buried within its website architecture, making them difficult for search engines and visitors to discover.
Neither situation necessarily means the website will disappear from Google overnight. However, addressing these problems could help important pages perform more effectively.
This is also where we consider the commercial value of individual URLs. If a technical issue affects a page responsible for a significant proportion of enquiries, it’s usually worth investigating before an equivalent issue affecting content with little commercial relevance.
Our rule: Prioritise issues affecting the pages and customer journeys most likely to generate revenue.
Priority 3: Improvements Worth Scheduling
This is where a substantial amount of routine technical SEO work sits.
Issues might include unnecessary redirect chains, inefficient internal linking, sitemap inconsistencies or performance improvements affecting less important templates.
These are still worth addressing, particularly when several small problems combine to make a website less efficient. However, we’d generally schedule them around more urgent work rather than treating everything as an emergency.
Website speed is a good example. Improving the performance of an important landing page can have genuine value, especially if visitors are struggling to use it. But spending several days moving a PageSpeed Insights score from 95 to 100 is unlikely to be our first recommendation if the same website has important pages missing from Google’s index.
Google’s page experience guidance confirms that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, but achieving good scores doesn’t guarantee top rankings. There’s more to search performance than a perfect technical score.
Our rule: Schedule improvements that have a credible benefit, but don’t let them distract from higher-impact problems.
Priority 4: Low-Impact Issues or Things We’d Leave Alone
This is probably the category that surprises clients most.
Sometimes, the best technical SEO recommendation is to do nothing.
That doesn’t mean ignoring genuine problems. It means recognising that some warnings have little practical impact, while others describe behaviour that’s completely intentional.
For example, a website might have hundreds of URLs excluded from indexing because they’re filtered product pages, internal search results or duplicate versions of existing content. Depending on the website’s architecture, those exclusions may be exactly what we want.
Similarly, a crawl might flag missing meta descriptions across a large archive of low-value pages. While we’d prefer important pages to have well-written descriptions, manually updating hundreds of irrelevant URLs isn’t necessarily going to produce a meaningful return.
Every recommendation has an opportunity cost. If we’re spending time fixing something unlikely to improve performance, that time isn’t being spent on work that could.
Our rule: An issue doesn’t need fixing simply because an auditing tool has highlighted it.
How We Decide Which Issues Come First
Those priority levels provide a useful starting point, but the actual decision-making is a little more nuanced. Two problems might both be classified as high priority, yet one could be resolved in half an hour while the other requires several days of development work.
This is why we look beyond technical severity and consider the potential return on the work involved.
1. What Is the Commercial Impact?
Our first consideration is usually which part of the website is affected and what that section contributes to the business.
For a local service business, that might mean prioritising the main service and location pages. For an e-commerce website, it could mean focusing on product categories or individual products generating substantial revenue.
A technical issue affecting an important enquiry page deserves attention because there’s a clear commercial reason to resolve it. The same issue affecting a largely unused archive page might be considerably less urgent.
This doesn’t mean ignoring informational content, particularly when it contributes to organic visibility or helps customers make decisions. It simply means considering the role each page plays rather than treating every URL as equally valuable.
2. How Widespread Is the Problem?
Next, we consider whether the issue affects an individual URL, a particular type of page or the entire website.
A missing canonical tag on one page might be relatively straightforward to investigate. The same problem affecting 10,000 product pages could indicate a template-level issue that needs addressing more urgently.
However, quantity alone isn’t enough to determine severity. A crawl might identify 20,000 intentionally excluded parameter URLs, while a single noindex directive could be preventing the homepage from appearing in Google.
It’s the relationship between scale and impact that matters.
3. How Difficult Is It to Fix?
Development time isn’t unlimited, and most businesses have other priorities competing for the same resources.
If we identify a relatively straightforward fix with a meaningful potential benefit, it may make sense to implement it immediately. More complicated changes need to be assessed against their cost, potential disruption and expected return.
For example, improving internal links across several important pages might be achievable within a few hours. Rebuilding a JavaScript rendering system could require considerably more development work, testing and coordination.
That doesn’t make the second issue less important. If rendering problems are preventing valuable content from being indexed, the investment may be entirely justified.
The key is understanding what you’re likely to gain before committing resources.
4. How Confident Are We That This Is Actually the Problem?
This is an important consideration that doesn’t always receive enough attention.
Just because a website has a technical issue doesn’t mean that issue is responsible for poor organic performance.
You might discover a collection of Core Web Vitals warnings while investigating declining traffic, but that doesn’t prove slow loading caused the decline. Search demand could have changed, competitors might have improved their content or the website could have been affected by a broader ranking change.
Google’s guidance on diagnosing search traffic declines recommends examining performance patterns and identifying whether problems affect the whole website or particular groups of pages.
We take a similar approach. Before recommending expensive technical changes, we’d rather establish a credible connection between the issue and the performance problem we’re trying to solve.
Sometimes that means doing more investigation before assigning a final priority.
A Practical Example: Which Technical SEO Issues Would We Fix First?
Let’s imagine we’ve completed a technical SEO audit for a medium-sized e-commerce business and identified the following issues.
| Issue | Potential impact | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Main product category pages accidentally set to noindex | Important commercial pages cannot be indexed | Critical |
| Product schema containing incorrect pricing information | Incorrect structured data on valuable product pages | High |
| 300 broken internal links across active product categories | Poor navigation and crawlability | High |
| Several important pages failing Core Web Vitals thresholds | Potential user experience and performance issues | Medium to High |
| 2,000 filtered URLs excluded from indexing as intended | No demonstrated problem | No action |
| 150 missing meta descriptions on old blog posts | Limited likely impact | Low |
| Several redirect chains in historical blog content | Some unnecessary requests, limited traffic impact | Low |
Illustrative example. Actual priorities depend on the website’s performance, architecture and business objectives.
Now imagine the client has enough development budget to address only two issues this month.
We’d almost certainly start with the noindex problem affecting the commercial category pages. Those pages need to be accessible to search engines before there’s much point optimising how they perform.
Next, we’d investigate the broken internal links or incorrect product schema, depending on the affected pages and the nature of the errors. If the broken links are preventing customers from reaching popular product categories, for example, we’d likely prioritise those.
What we wouldn’t do is spend the client’s limited budget writing 150 meta descriptions simply because the auditing software marked them as missing.
This is where prioritisation becomes commercially important. A technically cleaner website isn’t necessarily a more profitable website, and those two objectives shouldn’t be confused.
Why We Don’t Obsess Over SEO Audit Scores
Most major SEO platforms provide some form of website health score, often expressed as a percentage.
These can be useful for monitoring trends and identifying whether certain categories of errors are increasing. However, we don’t think they should be treated as the ultimate measure of technical SEO performance.
A website could achieve a very high health score while still having important commercial pages that struggle to appear in Google. Equally, a large, well-performing website might have thousands of warnings associated with URLs that have little relevance to its organic search strategy.
The difficulty is that auditing tools need to apply consistent rules across very different websites. They don’t necessarily know which pages generate your revenue, which issues are deliberate or how much development work a particular recommendation might involve.
Think of the score as a vehicle’s dashboard warning system. It’s useful for telling you something deserves attention, but it doesn’t replace a mechanic who understands how the vehicle works and whether the warning represents a genuine problem.
We absolutely use auditing tools, but we treat their findings as evidence to investigate rather than instructions to follow blindly.
For us, the more meaningful measures are whether important pages can be discovered and indexed, whether technical obstacles are being removed and whether the website is performing better as a result.
The Tools We Use to Investigate Technical SEO Problems
Prioritising technical SEO issues requires a combination of crawl data and real website performance information.
A crawler might identify that a page has a redirect problem, but Google Search Console can help us understand whether the affected URL attracts impressions or clicks. Analytics data can provide further context about the value of the page to the business.
Some of the tools we regularly consider for this work include:
Google Search Console: Particularly useful for investigating indexing issues, crawl patterns and the organic search performance of affected pages. It helps us distinguish between technical warnings that affect important pages and those that have little obvious commercial impact.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Useful for crawling a website, identifying technical inconsistencies and understanding how widespread particular issues are. Being able to export and segment affected URLs makes prioritisation considerably easier.
Google Analytics 4: Provides additional context about landing page performance and conversions. When an issue affects a commercially valuable page, analytics data can help justify why it should be addressed ahead of lower-impact problems.
PageSpeed Insights and Chrome UX Report: Useful for examining real-world loading performance and Core Web Vitals. We pay particular attention to important templates and pages where poor performance may affect the user experience.
We also use browser developer tools when investigating issues involving JavaScript rendering, broken resources or unexpected page behaviour. Sometimes the most useful investigation doesn’t begin with another SEO report, but with opening the affected page and understanding what’s actually happening.
The tools are there to help us make decisions. They’re not there to make every decision for us.
What Happens After We’ve Prioritised the Issues?
Once we’ve identified which problems are worth addressing, the next step is turning the audit into a practical development roadmap.
We prefer recommendations that explain what’s wrong, why it matters and what needs to change, rather than simply handing over an export containing hundreds of errors.
For example, instead of raising a ticket labelled Fix canonical tags, we’d want to identify which page templates are affected, what the correct canonical behaviour should be and how the change can be tested after implementation.
Where possible, we’d also group related issues together. If several hundred URLs are affected by the same template-level problem, fixing the underlying template is generally more efficient than making hundreds of individual changes.
This is an important distinction between identifying technical issues and actually managing technical SEO. The audit tells you what might be wrong, but the roadmap determines how you’re going to resolve it without creating new problems along the way.
We’d then monitor the relevant metrics after implementation to understand whether the changes have had the intended effect. Some improvements may become apparent quickly, while others depend on search engines recrawling pages and updating their indexes.
Not every fix produces an immediate increase in traffic, and some technical changes are primarily preventative. The important thing is having a clear reason for the work and an appropriate way to assess its success.
A Simple Technical SEO Prioritisation Checklist
If you’ve recently received a technical SEO audit and aren’t sure where to begin, we’d recommend working through the following questions before approving development work.
- Is this a genuine technical issue, or expected website behaviour?
- Does it prevent important pages from being crawled, rendered or indexed?
- Which pages or website sections are affected?
- Do those pages currently generate organic traffic or conversions?
- Could the issue be affecting customers as well as search engines?
- How widespread is the problem?
- Is there evidence linking the issue to a performance decline?
- What development work is required to fix it?
- Could the proposed fix create additional risks?
- Can we measure whether the change has been successful?
You don’t need to answer every technical question yourself. However, an SEO agency recommending development work should be able to explain why a particular issue deserves attention and what the business stands to gain by addressing it.
If the only justification is that an auditing tool has highlighted something in red, we’d suggest asking a few more questions.
When Should You Invest in Technical SEO?
Technical SEO isn’t something that needs to be treated as a constant emergency. For many smaller websites, periodic audits and routine maintenance will be sufficient to keep things functioning properly.
However, there are situations where more substantial technical work becomes worthwhile. A website migration, an unexplained decline in organic traffic or widespread indexing problems can justify a more detailed investigation. The same applies to growing e-commerce websites where increasing numbers of products and filtered URLs introduce greater technical complexity.
The key is matching the level of investment to the potential impact on the business.
At Peaco Marketing, our technical SEO services focus on identifying and resolving the issues that matter, rather than simply chasing a perfect audit score.
That means considering the technical evidence alongside your commercial objectives and development resources, then creating a plan that addresses the most valuable opportunities first.
Final Thoughts
Technical SEO can be complicated, but deciding what to work on shouldn’t feel like a guessing game.
A good audit should help you understand what could be holding your website back. A good technical SEO strategy goes further by explaining which issues are worth fixing, which can wait and why.
We’ve found that this distinction is particularly important for businesses with limited development resources. There will almost always be something else you could optimise, but that doesn’t mean it’s where your time or money should go next.
Sometimes the most valuable technical SEO work involves a complicated change affecting thousands of pages. Other times, it comes down to spotting one incorrect setting that’s stopping an important page from appearing in search results.
And sometimes, the right recommendation is to leave something alone.
Ultimately, technical SEO should support the performance of your business, not become an endless exercise in making auditing software happy.