Where to focus technical SEO when you can’t do it all

When technical issues hold your SEO program back, progress stalls. Yet technical SEO remains a top priority for leading SEOs and Google, and a key factor correlated with rankings in Backlinko’s 2026 Google ranking factors report. 

One of the biggest hurdles for in-house SEO programs is the lack of resources to implement changes to the website.

• Up to 67% of respondents cite non-SEO dev tasks as the biggest reason technical SEO changes can’t be made, according to Aira’s State of Technical SEO Report.
• This is costing businesses an additional $35.9 million in potential revenue each year, seoClarity estimates. 

When you can’t do everything, focus on the technical SEO tasks that drive the most impact. Here are the priorities to start with.

Where to focus first: Prioritization techniques

Most enterprise SEO teams want to fix issues that impact the most pages, revenue, and user journeys. Aira’s report ranks in-house technical SEO changes in this order:

• Quick wins (big impact, little effort).
• Expected impact on KPIs.
• Impact on users.
• Best practices based on Google guidelines.
• Industry changes and algorithm updates.

Still, with millions of pages, it’s difficult to know where to focus. Here are some tips:

• To limit what you work on, start with small groups of keywords or specific product areas.
• Fix any barriers to ranking. 
• Ensure all major pages are indexed.
• Consolidate, improve, or remove low-quality pages that don’t need to be indexed.

Starting with a technical SEO audit lets you identify the exact technical issues you need to resolve, hopefully with a prioritized list of tasks. 

SEO tools can help identify and prioritize technical fixes. You may also want to check out “SEO prioritization: How to focus on what moves the needle,” which includes prioritization techniques like the Eisenhower Matrix.

If asked for the top foundational technical SEO fixes, I’d point to the following:

1. Site architecture

A well-organized site creates the foundation for your SEO program to run more smoothly. Site structure impacts key SEO outcomes, including crawling, indexing, and user experience, and getting this piece right really sets the stage for a site primed for search.

Fundamentally, site architecture (what I call “SEO siloing”) helps you organize a site around how people search. The goal is to have your content and navigation hierarchy mirror the keyword themes/queries people use and to couple that with content that answers intent across the customer journey.

For example, this is how a “power tools” section of a large ecommerce site might be siloed/organized:

The internal linking piece of siloing reinforces topical authority and funnels strength toward your primary landing pages. This alignment between search behavior, content themes, and site structure turns your site into a ranking asset.

In AI-powered search, you want your enterprise site to be well-organized, with a clear hierarchy and strong internal linking to send stronger relevance signals. 

Here are common site architecture issues to look for:

• Important pages that are buried deep in the site (four-plus clicks from the homepage).
• Orphaned or weakly linked high-value pages.
• Any content topics that lack a clear thematic hub or silo.
• Multiple pages competing for the same core query.
• Lack of internal linking to connect and reinforce key content sections/silos.
• Thin or fragmented supporting pages.
• Taxonomy structures (like tags, archives, categories) that are competing with core pages.

A full site architecture overhaul is difficult in enterprise environments, so focus on the tasks you can reasonably get done. Consider these three action items to help make an impact with potentially the least resistance:

Strengthen internal linking to priority content 

Internal linking can be deployed without changing the core site architecture/URL structure, so this is usually a faster win. Look to fix:

• Revenue-driving pages that are not positioned as thematic hubs.
• Topical pages that aren’t interlinked but support the customer journey. 
• Relevant blog content that doesn’t link back to specific topical hubs or service/product pages.
• High-authority pages that are not linking to supporting pages. 
• Cross-linking between unrelated themes that may dilute topical focus.

Consolidate topics before rebuilding the structure

Instead of reorganizing the entire taxonomy, you can look for things like multiple pages that are targeting the same primary keyword/queries, thin variations of the same topic across different URLs and blog content that may be competing with key pages like products/services.

Here, you can merge overlapping content, choose and reposition one page as the thematic hub and redirect URLs as needed. 

Elevate key pages closer to the top

When resources are tight or politics get in the way, you can reinforce the site architecture by ensuring that:

• Priority pages are within two to three clicks.
• You add contextual links to reinforce thematic hubs/silos by implementing things like “related resources.”

2. Crawling and indexing

At the enterprise level, crawling and indexing issues are almost guaranteed. But which issues deserve immediate attention?

Fix indexing issues first

This step may feel obvious, but it’s often overlooked. When search engines aren’t indexing the pages that matter most, this step becomes a No. 1 priority on the “fix” list.

But with so many URLs on an enterprise site, it can be overwhelming to review the Google Search Console Page indexing report. So instead, you can start by filtering the Page Indexing report by your XML sitemap. Compare the URLs listed in the sitemap with what Google has indexed. 

Any sitemap URLs that are not indexed should be investigated first. Determine why they’re excluded and fix those issues before expanding your analysis.

During your page reviews, you can do a quick triage by checking:

• Robots.txt rules that may be blocking critical sections.
• Noindex tags that may have been accidentally deployed.
• Canonical tags that might be pointing to the wrong versions.
• Any rendering issues preventing search engines from seeing content.

Eliminate signal dilution

It’s not uncommon for pages across a large site to send mixed signals to search engines. In enterprise environments, this often happens at the template level where one structural issue can weaken countless URLs.

Look for these problems:

• Multiple URL variations being indexed (HTTP/HTTPS, trailing slash inconsistencies, parameter variants).
• Canonical tags that conflict with internal links or XML sitemaps.
• Near-duplicate pages targeting the same primary query.
• Redirect chains that are working inefficiently.
• Important pages rendering with more than one URL.

Reduce crawl waste

For an enterprise site, crawl budget is a strategic resource. You want to avoid having crawlers spend time on pages that don’t matter. To see if this is happening, check for some common culprits: 

• Excess crawl activity on faceted navigation and parameter URLs (filters, sorting, pagination variations).
• Internal search results being indexed.
• Thin or competing archive structures (tag, category, or date archives).
• Out-of-stock or low-value product pages cluttering the index.
• Thin, auto-generated, or outdated location pages.
• Staging or test environments accidentally being indexed.
• Legacy or irrelevant content that’s still crawlable.

3. Website performance

If your site is hard to use, it wastes the organic traffic that you’ve worked hard to get. Yelp and Pinterest are two examples of organizations that invested in site performance and experienced revenue and engagement lifts. 

• Yelp reported a 15% increase in conversion rate after improving page performance and reducing load times.
• Pinterest reported that after launching its Progressive Web App, time spent increased 40%, user-generated ad revenue rose 44%, and core engagements grew 60%.

What requests should you prioritize?

Fix backend bottlenecks first

When the backend is performing poorly, it impacts everything from site speed and crawl efficiency to user experience metrics. Check for problems like:

• High Time to First Byte (TTFB) on any key templates.
• Sluggish performance on high-traffic pages.
• Heavy CMS processing or middleware overhead that delays page generation. 
• Slow database queries that lengthen the server response time.

Some action items that can address these issues include: 

• Implementing full-page or edge caching for high-traffic templates.
• Optimizing database queries and reducing CMS processing overhead on dynamic pages.
• Upgrading hosting or moving to a scalable cloud infrastructure for traffic spikes.

Reduce JavaScript and rendering bottlenecks

Enterprise sites face more navigation issues — especially with filters or JavaScript — and accumulate script bloat. Tag managers, personalization engines, testing platforms, and third-party widgets stack up over time.

Unfortunately, no one wants to remove them because they’re not sure if they’re still needed. When you reduce execution overhead, it can improve interactivity and stability without having to redesign the site.

Here are some problems to look for:

• Large JavaScript bundles that are loading sitewide.
• Third-party scripts that are blocking rendering.
• Poor Interaction to Next Paint (INP) scores.
• Core content that’s dependent on client-side rendering.

Some high-impact fixes to consider:

• Audit and remove unused or redundant third-party scripts.
• Defer or lazy-load any non-critical JavaScript.
• Shift critical content to render before JavaScript execution by deploying server-side rendering or hybrid rendering where possible.

Improve what users see first

Site performance is also about perceived speed and the first meaningful interaction for users. This is another area where Google’s Core Web Vitals become useful as a diagnostic tool.

Common culprits that cause issues in the user experience category include:

• Hero images that are loading late.
• Any render-blocking CSS or JavaScript.
• Layout shifts that are caused by ads or dynamic elements.
• Above-the-fold content that’s being delayed by non-critical assets.

When considering what to fix, focus on structural optimizations that change how the browser prioritizes what matters most:

• Preload and properly size all above-the-fold images.
• Inline critical CSS and defer any non-essential styles/scripts.
• Reserve static space in the layout for dynamic or third-party elements (ads, embeds) to prevent layout shifts.

Improve speed

Improving page speed helps improve indexing. The slower and larger pages are, the fewer Google will crawl. That isn’t an issue if your site has 500 pages. It’s an issue getting a million pages indexed.

The Google Search Console Crawl Stats report is an underutilized tool. The report shows how Googlebot is crawling your site, including the total number of crawl requests, total download size and average response time for fetched resources.

Bonus: Mobile user experience

About 63% of website traffic is mobile, according to Statista. But the majority of sites aren’t prioritizing their mobile experiences, according to a study by the Baymard Institute.

For example:

• 95% of sites put ads in key areas of the homepage that cause interaction issues.
• 61% don’t use the correct keyboard layouts, which cause accidental typos.
• 66% place tappable elements too close together, and 32% of sites have tappable elements that are too small. 

A responsive website is the baseline. But mobile experiences go beyond this foundation. The most successful enterprises are thinking about how to create sites that are dialed in for mobile users. 

While most would agree that many UX functions fall outside the realm of technical SEO, the ability of your site to retain and convert mobile traffic is a shared goal for SEO and UX teams.

With that in mind, you can analyze your mobile experiences alongside your colleagues by thinking about the following questions: 

• Are your most important pages meeting Core Web Vitals thresholds? 
• Is your critical content fully visible on mobile, or is it hidden behind tabs, accordions, or scripts?
• Are you optimizing for mobile-first indexing by ensuring that structured data, internal links, etc., match desktop versions?
• Is your content formatted for mobile scanning with short paragraphs, clear visual hierarchy, and fast-loading media?
• Are you accounting for emerging user behaviors in your content, like voice queries and AI-generated summaries?
• Is your navigation mobile-friendly, as in simple, thumb-friendly menus, intuitive hierarchy, and easy access to key actions?
• Have you evaluated any gesture-based interactions, simplified checkout flows or reduced any input friction for mobile users?
• Are you measuring real-user mobile performance (not just lab scores) to identify any friction in the wild?

Build momentum with high-impact technical wins

Technical SEO can feel overwhelming, especially when you don’t control the entire process. Focusing on fundamentals like site structure, crawlability, and user experience sets the stage for everything else in your SEO program.

Prioritize the areas that deliver the biggest impact for the least resistance, and build momentum from there.