Chapter 05: Tech SEO

Good tech SEO does absolutely nothing

Let me explain. If your technical SEO is good, it’s like having a clear pipe—everything flows as expected, but you won’t see a magical boost. Bad tech SEO, though, is like a clogged pipe that blocks your site’s performance. 

So if you haven’t optimized your website for SEO, if your website should have been getting 10 MQLs/month, it may only be bringing in 6 MQLs/month. When you fix tech SEO, you gain back the 4 you should have been getting all along.

Your goal is to fix the real blockages that hold you back, not every small issue flagged by tools.

Typical mistakes SEOs make:

Many teams get stuck on what to prioritize. Tools like Screaming Frog and GTmetrix flag tons of issues, but they don’t help us prioritize what is important really well. 

Let’s take an example of Site Speed:

A lot of teams obsess over site speed scores. They’ll run tests and get a “B” or “C” grade by their pagespeed test tool, then spend hours trying to boost it to an “A”. But guess what? If your site is already loading fast (under half a second), that score doesn’t matter. I’ve seen websites with low scores loading instantly, and improving those scores would require significant development resources—resources better spent elsewhere.

Let’s look at metadata:

When you run a large website through an SEO tool, very often it’ll tell you you have a crazy number of metadata issues (Like 3729, sometimes even more.) Some SEOs just give that as an action item: “Content team, please go fix these thousands of issues.” 

Of course, this isn’t ideal. This wastes a lot of time and very often the task never gets picked up because it was an unreasonable ask. So, even the few places where it should have been fixed, don’t get fixed. Also, there is no real instruction given by the SEO team on what keyword to optimize the metadata for which makes this even worse.

So what should you prioritize?

When you run a crawl, it’s common to find 100s or even 1000s of technical issues flagged by the crawlers. If you try to fix everything, it can take a lot of time and effort.

That’s why prioritization is key.

There are many ways to do this, but here’s a method that’s almost always effective. 

Focus on these two sets of technical issues.

1. Tech issues in your key pages:

Pages in your navbar, footer, and ones that generate leads need to be perfect. For these pages, you typically want to optimize EVERYTHING.

All the important stuff, and the less important stuff (list of these are below).

Tech Issues by Importance
Higher importance	Lower importance
Canonicals Broken pages (404) Server errors Page speed Indexability Missing title, H1 Multiple H1 Site structure URL structure Internal links Header	Headers other than H1 Missing Anchor texts  Missing Breadcrumbs 404 Errors on Old/Unused URLs Non-Responsive Analytics Tracking Temporary Server Hiccups Broken links Image compression

2. Template-level fixes

Fixing any tech issues in a template that generates 100s of pages at once is always valuable.

Knowing what to prioritize is where most SEO teams fail. Anyone can run a tool and find issues, but the real value lies in understanding what to fix.