How to Fix What's Stopping Your Website from Ranking
There's a good chance your website is broken right now, and you don't even know it. Not visually broken- it probably looks fine to you. But behind the scenes, Google's crawlers are hitting walls, getting confused by duplicate pages, or simply giving up before they index your most important content.
This is the invisible side of SEO. While everyone obsesses over keywords and backlinks, technical issues quietly sabotage rankings. A single misconfigured robots.txt file can hide your entire site from Google. A slow-loading page can tank your positions overnight. Pages without proper structure get skipped entirely.
The good news? Technical problems have technical solutions. Once you know what to look for, most issues are surprisingly straightforward to fix. And the impact is immediate- I've seen sites double their traffic within weeks of resolving critical technical errors.
Let me walk you through what's likely going wrong and exactly how to fix it.
When your site isn't ranking, most people assume they need more content or more backlinks. Sometimes that's true. But often, the real problem is technical.
Think of it this way: you could have the best shop in town, but if it's hidden down a dark alley with a broken door and no sign, nobody's finding it. That's what technical SEO issues do to your website. Google sends out crawlers (little bots) to explore and understand your site. If those crawlers can't access your pages, can't figure out what's important, or get confused by duplicate content, your site simply won't rank - regardless of how good your content is.I've worked on websites where fixing a single technical issue doubled their organic traffic within weeks.
That's the power of getting this right.
Technical SEO is everything that happens behind the scenes to make your website work properly for search engines. It's separate from your content and your backlinks, but all three need to work together. You could have the best content and links in your industry, but if your technical foundation is broken, you're building on sand.
Technical SEO is everything that happens behind the scenes to make your website work properly for search engines. It's separate from your content and your backlinks, but all three need to work together. You could have the best content and links in your industry, but if your technical foundation is broken, you're building on sand.
The problem: Google's crawlers can't access certain pages on your site, which means those pages will never rank.
How to spot it: Google Search Console will show you pages that are "Discovered - currently not indexed" or "Crawled - currently not indexed." These are pages Google found but chose not to add to search results.
What needs fixing: Your robots.txt file might be blocking important pages, or your site structure makes certain pages impossible for crawlers to reach efficiently. Sometimes it's as simple as pages having no internal links pointing to them.
The problem: Even if Google can crawl your pages, it might choose not to index them, meaning they won't appear in search results at all.
What might be causing this:
How to spot it: Search "site:yourwebsite.com" in Google. If the number of results is dramatically lower than your actual page count, you've got indexing issues.
What needs fixing: Pages might be accidentally marked "noindex," your XML sitemap could be missing or broken, or Google sees your content as too thin or duplicate to bother indexing.
The problem: Slow websites frustrate users and rank worse in Google. Simple as that.
Google measures three specific metrics called Core Web Vitals:
How to spot it: Run your site and different templates through PageSpeed Insights or WebPage Test. It'll measure your Core Web Vitals and tell you if you're passing or failing Google's speed benchmarks.
What needs fixing: Usually it's because of t's oversized images, too many scripts loading, or poor server response times. Sometimes it's your hosting, sometimes it's how your site is built.
The problem: Over 60% of searches happen on mobile devices. If your site doesn't work properly on phones, Google will penalise your rankings.
What to look for:
How to spot it: Run manual checks on mobile devices or use Chrome DevTools and Inspect
What needs fixing: Your design needs to be responsive, adapting properly to different screen sizes. Buttons need to be tappable, text needs to be readable without zooming, and nothing should require horizontal scrolling.
The problem: When you have multiple URLs showing the same (or very similar) content, Google doesn't know which version to rank. So it might rank the wrong one, or not rank any of them well.
What to look for:
How to spot it: Look for similar pages competing for the same keywords in your Search Console data, or check the coverage report for "Duplicate content" warnings.
What needs fixing: You need canonical tags pointing to the preferred version of each page. This is particularly important for e-commerce sites with product variations or sites with complex URL parameters.
The problem: Without structured data, your search listings are plain text. Competitors with structured data get star ratings, prices, FAQs, and other rich results that steal clicks from you.
What structured data does:
How to spot it: Use Google's Rich Results Test tool on your important pages. If it comes back empty, you're missing out on enhanced search listings. It's a great way to also spy on your competitors!
What needs fixing: Your pages need Schema markup (structured data) implemented in the correct format. The type of schema depends on your content—products, articles, local businesses, FAQs, and reviews all have different markup requirements.
The problem: Sites without HTTPS (the padlock in the browser) are flagged as "Not Secure" by browsers. Google also gives preference to secure sites.
How to spot it: Look at your URL bar. If it says "http://" instead of "https://" or there's no padlock icon, you're not secure.
The problem: You need an SSL certificate installed and properly configured. This also means redirecting all old HTTP URLs to their HTTPS equivalents and updating your sitemap.
The problem: When visitors or crawlers land on pages that don't exist, it creates a terrible experience and signals that your site isn't well-maintained.
Common causes:
The problem: Google Search Console shows these in the "Pages" section under "Not found (404)" errors. You'll see exactly which URLs are broken and how Google discovered them.
What needs fixing: Broken pages need to be either fixed or redirected to relevant alternatives. The key is implementing proper 301 redirects so neither users nor search engines hit dead ends.
Here's what most people don't realise: technical SEO problems don't stay contained.
They multiply. I've seen sites where a single misconfigured canonical tag created a cascade effect - duplicate content signals confused Google's algorithm, which then devalued the entire category, which then affected related products, which eventually tanked traffic across the whole site.
By the time they noticed, they'd lost 60% of their organic visibility. Or the e-commerce site that had been running on HTTP for "just a few more months" while planning their HTTPS migration. Except those months turned into a year, and by then, their competitors had pulled ahead so significantly that the SSL fix alone couldn't close the gap. They'd lost trust signals, ranking positions, and market share.
The pattern I see repeatedly: businesses know something's wrong (traffic is flat, conversions are down, rankings aren't moving), but they don't connect it to technical issues because everything looks fine on the surface. Meanwhile, Google's crawlers are hitting obstacles daily, and competitors with cleaner technical foundations are steadily taking their positions.
Fixing technical SEO doesn’t always produce the same results. Two sites can apply the same fixes and see completely different outcomes because rankings depend on many other factors, however:
In the first few weeks, you'll see Google recrawl and reindex pages that were previously being ignored or misunderstood. Rankings might jump or drop initially as Google reassesses everything - this is normal and usually stabilises quickly.
Within 2-3 months, pages that were stuck on page 3-5 often climb into page 1-2 positions. Not because the content changed, but because Google can finally crawl, understand, and properly value them. I've seen this happen countless times- the content was always good enough to rank, it just needed the technical barriers removed.
After 6 months, you're playing on a level field with competitors. Your content quality and backlinks actually matter now because technical issues aren't sabotaging them anymore. This is when other SEO efforts finally deliver their full potential.But here's the crucial part: the impact varies wildly depending on which issues you had and how severe they were. A site with major indexation problems will see a bigger jump than one with just minor speed issues. A thousand-page e-commerce site with duplicate content chaos will transform more dramatically than a fifty-page service site with a few broken links.
Technical SEO is the foundation everything else builds on. You can have brilliant content, powerful backlinks, and a beautiful website, but if Google can't properly crawl, index, and understand your pages, you're competing with one hand tied behind your back.
The frustrating part is that technical issues are invisible to most business owners. Your site looks fine. It works fine for visitors. But behind the scenes, crawlers are hitting obstacles, duplicate content is diluting your authority, and speed issues are quietly suppressing your rankings.
The encouraging part? Technical problems have technical solutions. They're not mysterious or unpredictable. Once properly diagnosed and fixed, they stay fixed. And the impact on your organic visibility can be substantial - sometimes dramatically so. Your competitors ranking above you have likely already addressed these fundamentals. They're not necessarily producing better content or earning more backlinks. They've just removed the technical barriers that were holding them back.
The question is: how long will you let fixable technical issues cost you rankings, traffic, and revenue?
You shouldn't need to become a technical SEO expert to get your website ranking. You need someone who's already solved these problems many times and knows exactly what's holding your site back. If you suspect technical issues are costing you visibility, reach out we'll tell you exactly what's wrong and what it'll take to fix it.
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