Technical SEO: Common Issues and How to Fix Them

Technical SEO covers the infrastructure of your website rather than its content. Where on-page SEO deals with what your pages say and how they are written, technical SEO deals with whether search engines can access, crawl, and correctly index those pages in the first place. A website with excellent content but significant technical problems will consistently underperform in search results because Google cannot reliably access or understand what it is looking at.

For businesses in Belfast and across Northern Ireland, technical SEO issues are common and often go undetected for years. Many businesses have websites that have been updated and added to over time without any structured technical review, accumulating problems that gradually suppress rankings without any obvious single cause.

Crawling and Indexing

Before Google can rank a page, it needs to crawl it and index it. Crawling is the process of Google’s bots visiting your pages by following links. Indexing is the process of adding those pages to Google’s database so they can appear in search results. If either step fails, the page will not rank regardless of how well it is optimised.

Google Search Console’s Pages report shows exactly which pages on your site are indexed and which are not, along with the reason for any pages that have been excluded. Common reasons for pages not being indexed include a noindex tag set accidentally in Yoast SEO, pages blocked by the robots.txt file, pages that Google has crawled but judged to be low quality or thin content, and pages that have no internal links pointing to them and are therefore difficult for Google to discover.

For a Northern Ireland business website, the most common indexing problems found in audits are service pages accidentally set to noindex, old pages returning 404 errors because they were deleted without redirects being set up, and tag and category archive pages from WordPress being indexed unnecessarily and creating hundreds of low-quality indexed URLs. All three are straightforward to fix once identified.

Submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console helps Google discover and crawl your pages systematically. In WordPress, Yoast SEO generates a sitemap automatically and you can submit it in Search Console under Sitemaps. After making significant changes to your site, submitting individual updated URLs through the URL Inspection tool and clicking Request Indexing speeds up recrawling.

Page Speed and Core Web Vitals

Page speed is a confirmed Google ranking factor, and Google’s Core Web Vitals are the specific metrics it uses to measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. The three Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint, which measures loading speed, Interaction to Next Paint, which measures responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift, which measures visual stability as the page loads.

For Northern Ireland business websites, the most common speed issues are uncompressed images, too many plugins adding unnecessary scripts to every page, and hosting that is too slow for the site’s requirements. A business using shared hosting on an entry-level plan with a WordPress site running 30 active plugins and unoptimised images will consistently fail Core Web Vitals, particularly on mobile.

Google PageSpeed Insights at pagespeed.web.dev will analyse any page for free and produce a scored report with specific recommendations. Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report shows performance across your whole site based on real user data rather than a lab test. The two tools together give a complete picture of speed issues and which pages need the most urgent attention.

The most impactful speed fixes for most Northern Ireland business websites are compressing and correctly sizing images before uploading, using a caching plugin such as WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache, and removing or deactivating plugins that are no longer needed. For sites where hosting is the primary bottleneck, moving to a managed WordPress hosting provider typically produces a significant improvement in Core Web Vitals scores.

HTTPS and Security

HTTPS encrypts data transmitted between your website and the user’s browser. Google has used HTTPS as a ranking signal since 2014 and Chrome displays a “Not Secure” warning for any page served over HTTP. For a Northern Ireland business, having a non-secure site undermines trust with potential customers before they have read a word of your content.

Most hosting providers include SSL certificates as standard or offer them for a small additional cost. On Namecheap hosting, SSL certificates are available through the hosting control panel. Once installed, all HTTP URLs need to be redirected to their HTTPS equivalents using 301 redirects to avoid duplicate content issues and ensure Google indexes only the secure versions.

After moving to HTTPS, check Google Search Console to confirm the HTTPS version of your site is the one being indexed. Submit the HTTPS sitemap if you have not already done so, and update any internal links that still point to HTTP URLs.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content occurs when the same or very similar content appears at multiple URLs. Google does not penalise duplicate content in most cases, but it does struggle to decide which version to rank, often choosing neither particularly well. For Northern Ireland business websites, the most common sources of duplicate content are HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same pages both being accessible, www and non-www versions of the site both being indexed, printer-friendly page versions, and WordPress tag and category archives that duplicate post content.

Canonical tags tell Google which version of a page is the preferred one for indexing. In Yoast SEO, canonical tags are set automatically based on your site settings, but they should be checked on pages where duplication is suspected. Redirecting all non-canonical versions to the preferred URL using 301 redirects resolves most duplicate content issues cleanly.

WordPress tag and category archives are a specific issue worth addressing directly. These pages are generated automatically and often contain only excerpts of content that appears in full on the individual post pages, creating thin duplicate content at scale. In Yoast SEO, tag and category archives can be set to noindex under Search Appearance, which removes them from Google’s index without deleting them from the site.

Broken Links and Redirect Errors

Broken links lead users and search engine crawlers to pages that no longer exist, returning a 404 error. They waste crawl budget, pass no link authority, and create a poor user experience. For Northern Ireland business websites that have been live for several years and have had pages added and removed over time, broken links are almost universal.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider will crawl your entire site and produce a full report of broken internal and external links. Google Search Console’s Pages report also flags 404 errors that Google has encountered while crawling. Both tools should be checked as part of any technical audit.

Broken internal links should be updated to point to the correct live page. If a page has been permanently removed, a 301 redirect from the old URL to the most relevant live page recovers any authority that was passing through the old link. In WordPress, the Redirection plugin manages 301 redirects without requiring server access or .htaccess editing.

Mobile Optimisation

Google uses mobile-first indexing for all websites, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of your pages when crawling, indexing, and ranking. A website that looks and functions well on desktop but has problems on mobile is being assessed by Google primarily on the mobile experience.

For Northern Ireland businesses where a significant proportion of local searches happen on smartphones, mobile problems directly affect both rankings and conversions. A contact page that is difficult to read on a mobile screen, a phone number that is not click-to-call enabled, or a form that is hard to complete on a small screen are all conversion problems that also signal poor mobile experience to Google.

Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report flags specific mobile problems on individual pages. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test at search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly will test any URL and show how Google’s crawler sees the mobile version of the page. In WordPress, most modern themes including Kadence are responsive by default, but custom CSS changes and third-party plugins can introduce mobile display problems that need to be checked and corrected.

Image Alt Text

Alt text is the text alternative for an image that appears if the image fails to load and is read by screen readers for visually impaired users. From an SEO perspective, alt text tells Google what an image depicts, which contributes to image search indexing and supports the page’s topical relevance signals.

For Northern Ireland business websites, the most common alt text problems are images with no alt text at all, images with generic alt text like “image1.jpg” or “photo,” and images with keyword-stuffed alt text that reads unnaturally. Each image should have a concise, descriptive alt text that accurately describes what the image shows. A photo of the exterior of a Belfast accountancy office should have alt text like “Henderson Accountants Belfast office exterior” rather than “accountant Belfast tax return bookkeeper Northern Ireland.”

Screaming Frog will produce a full report of images with missing or problematic alt text across your entire site. In WordPress, alt text is added in the media library or directly in the image block when adding an image to a page or post.

Structured Data and Schema

Structured data gives Google explicit, machine-readable information about your content. For Northern Ireland businesses, local business schema that includes your name, address, phone number, opening hours, and business category is the most impactful structured data to implement. FAQ schema on service pages can produce expandable question and answer results directly in Google search listings.

You can read more about schema types and how to implement them in my post on schema markup for Northern Ireland businesses.

Internal Linking Structure

Internal links connect pages within your site and serve two purposes: they help users navigate to related content, and they pass authority from one page to another. Pages with no internal links pointing to them are harder for Google to discover and receive no internal authority from the rest of the site.

For a Northern Ireland business website, the key service pages should receive internal links from multiple other pages including the homepage, related blog posts, and other service pages where the link is relevant. A Belfast SEO consultancy whose blog posts on keyword research, meta tags, and H1 tags all link to the main SEO services page is concentrating internal authority on the page most likely to convert visitors into clients.

Screaming Frog’s site crawl shows the internal link count for every page, making it straightforward to identify pages with few or no internal links pointing to them. These are the pages most in need of internal linking work.

Robots.txt and Crawl Management

The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site to crawl and which to ignore. An incorrectly configured robots.txt can accidentally block Google from crawling your entire site or specific sections of it. This is one of the most serious technical SEO errors possible and one of the most easily introduced through a misconfigured plugin or a well-intentioned but incorrect manual edit.

In Google Search Console, the robots.txt report shows the current file and flags any issues. The URL Inspection tool will also show whether a specific page is being blocked by robots.txt. In WordPress with Yoast SEO, the robots.txt file is editable through Yoast SEO’s Tools section. Any changes should be tested in Search Console immediately after saving.

Conducting a Technical SEO Audit

A technical SEO audit reviews all of the above areas systematically and produces a prioritised list of issues to address. The tools needed for a basic audit are Google Search Console, which is free, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which is free for sites under 500 URLs, and Google PageSpeed Insights, which is also free.

For most Northern Ireland business websites, a technical audit will identify between 10 and 30 specific issues, ranging from quick fixes like missing alt text and duplicate title tags to more involved work like page speed optimisation and redirect cleanup. Addressing the highest-priority issues first produces the fastest improvement in rankings and crawlability.

If you want a full technical audit of your website alongside an on-page and content review, an SEO audit covers all of this in a single process with a prioritised action plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is technical SEO and why does it matter?

Technical SEO covers the infrastructure of your website, specifically whether search engines can access, crawl, and correctly index your pages. Without a sound technical foundation, good content and on-page optimisation will underperform because Google cannot reliably access or understand the site. Technical issues are often invisible to the business owner but consistently suppress rankings until they are identified and fixed.

How do I know if my site has technical SEO problems?

Google Search Console is the starting point. The Pages report shows indexing errors, the Core Web Vitals report shows speed problems, and the Mobile Usability report shows mobile issues. Screaming Frog will crawl your entire site and flag broken links, missing alt text, duplicate title tags, and redirect errors. Running both tools will surface the most common technical problems on any Northern Ireland business website.

How does page speed affect my Google rankings?

Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor through Google’s Core Web Vitals. Slow pages rank below faster competitors with comparable content, particularly on mobile. The impact is most pronounced for local searches where multiple competing businesses have similar on-page optimisation and the technical performance of the site becomes a differentiating factor. Google PageSpeed Insights will score any page and identify the specific issues causing slowness.

What is the difference between a 301 and 302 redirect?

A 301 redirect is permanent and tells Google to transfer the authority of the old URL to the new one. A 302 redirect is temporary and does not transfer authority. For any page that has been permanently moved or deleted, a 301 redirect should be used. Using 302 redirects where 301s are needed means the old URL retains its authority rather than passing it to the new destination, which wastes link equity built up over time.

Does my Northern Ireland business website need HTTPS?

Yes. HTTPS is a ranking signal, Chrome marks non-HTTPS sites as Not Secure, and users are increasingly reluctant to submit contact forms or personal information on non-secure sites. SSL certificates are included with most hosting packages or available at minimal cost. If your site is still running on HTTP, moving to HTTPS is one of the most straightforward technical fixes available and should be prioritised.

How often should I run a technical SEO audit?

A full technical audit once a year is a reasonable baseline for most Northern Ireland business websites. Between audits, Google Search Console should be checked monthly for new indexing errors, crawl issues, and Core Web Vitals problems. After any significant changes to the site, such as a redesign, a platform migration, or a large batch of new content, a targeted technical check should be run to confirm nothing has broken.

If you want help identifying and fixing the technical SEO issues affecting your site’s performance, get in touch for a free consultation and I can review your Search Console data and run a crawl to identify the most urgent issues.