A technical SEO audit can surface dozens of issues. The problem is that most of them don't matter equally — and fixing low-impact issues first is how months get wasted with nothing to show in rankings.
Tier 1: Fix immediately (high impact)
- Core Web Vitals: LCP, FID/INP, and CLS directly influence rankings and user experience. Use PageSpeed Insights to diagnose.
- Crawlability: Check that Googlebot can access your most important pages. A misconfigured robots.txt or accidental noindex tag can wipe traffic overnight.
- HTTPS: If any page is still serving over HTTP, fix it today.
- Mobile usability: Google indexes mobile-first. Broken mobile layouts are a ranking penalty.
Tier 2: High priority (medium impact)
- Duplicate content and canonical tags: Multiple URLs serving the same content dilutes link equity.
- Broken internal links: 404s waste crawl budget and break user journeys.
- XML sitemap accuracy: Your sitemap should only include canonical, indexable URLs.
Tier 3: Important but not urgent
- Schema markup completeness
- Image alt text coverage
- Page depth (no important page more than 3 clicks from the homepage)