How to prioritise Technical SEO: When everything else feels important

If you’ve ever looked at a technical SEO audit and felt completely overwhelmed, you’re not alone. For many in-house marketing teams, technical SEO feels like a dark art: a long list of fixes with no clear order of importance and no obvious link to bottom-line results.

Our Head of SEO, Nicola Hughes, spills the beans on how we cut through the noise, prioritise what matters, and build clear roadmaps that get results. At TAL, we’re all about demystifying technical SEO and helping marketing teams focus on the changes that actually move the needle. Here’s how we approach it when everything feels important.

Tying everything back to revenue

Our golden rule is that if a technical task doesn’t support visibility, traffic or conversions, then it doesn’t make it onto the roadmap. Every recommendation we make is backed by data, and clearly tied to your goals, whether that’s lead generation, sales, or simply improving your brand’s share of voice.

Always ask:

• Will this help get more content indexed?
  
• Will this improve crawl efficiency or reduce wasted budget?
  
• Will this unlock performance for key pages?
  

If the answer’s yes, it goes on the priority list.

Where we start

We typically start with four key areas that we know deliver the biggest impact:

Site structure review

 Is your content arranged in a logical way that supports both users and search engines? Can Google easily understand your core topics and services? Are URLs clean and easy to understand? Are there any orphaned pages that are practically invisible to users and search engines? An in-depth site structure review will help identify any issues and provide a clean structure that will help to improve visibility.

Crawl analysis

We love the crawl stats reports in Google Search Console. This tells us what types of pages Google is crawling and how often. For many clients we often find Google is spending lots of time crawling unimportant pages such as parameter URLs, 404s or too much time crawling Javascript and CSS. Why does this matter? If Google is spending all of its time crawling thin or unoptimised content, then the pages you want to rank are likely getting ignored. 

Structured data review

From product schema to FAQs, we audit your markup to identify rich snippet opportunities and improve how your pages appear in the SERPs. This is the key to enhanced visibility on the SERPs and increased CTRs meaning more traffic and more revenue. 

Internal linking review

Are you distributing authority effectively across the site? Are key pages getting the support they need from other areas of the site? Internal linking is often the 

Our process: No stone left unturned

We don’t rely on guesswork. We’ve developed comprehensive technical audit templates that cover everything from crawlability and indexation to site architecture, internal linking and structured data.

We combine tools like:

• Screaming Frog and Sitebulb for deep crawl insights
• Ahrefs and SEMrush for backlink and keyword data
• Google Search Console for real-world performance and coverage issues
  

This layered approach means we can confidently prioritise issues based on both what’s technically broken and what’s commercially valuable.

Tech and content should work together

We don’t believe in working in silos. Content and tech SEO go hand in hand. It’s no good having beautifully written content if Google can’t crawl or index it. Likewise, no technical fix will solve the problem if your content doesn’t meet user intent.

We collaborate across content and technical teams to ensure that every change,  whether it’s a canonical fix, a robots.txt update or a new content hub, supports organic visibility and drives better user journeys.

The outcome: A clear, actionable roadmap

Once we’ve audited and prioritised, we deliver a roadmap that your in-house teams (or your dev partners) can easily follow. Everything is ordered by business impact, and monitored for results. No fluff, no 80-page audit sitting in a folder gathering dust.

Use this quick checklist to help you turn a mountain of technical fixes into a focused action plan:

• Have you aligned technical fixes with revenue or visibility goals?
  
• Have you completed a full crawl using tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb?
  
• Have you mapped all findings in a central spreadsheet with priority, impact, and ownership?
  
• Have you reviewed site structure for crawl depth, duplication, and hierarchy?
  
• Have you analysed Google Search Console for indexing and coverage issues?
  
• Have you audited structured data for key page types (e.g. product, FAQ, article)?
  
• Have you reviewed internal linking to support your most valuable pages?
  
• Are tech and content teams aligned on next steps?
  
• Have you built a roadmap with clear timelines and owners?
  
• Are you tracking the impact of changes through rankings, sessions or conversions?
  

Need support prioritising your own technical SEO?

Whether you’re dealing with a messy migration, a flatlining content strategy or a bloated crawl profile, we’re here to help with our technical SEO services. Let’s make your site easier to crawl, easier to rank, and easier to convert.

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