How to Fix Technical SEO Issues (Common Fixes Explained)
Technical SEO issues are the silent killers of organic traffic. You can publish great content every week and still see rankings plateau because of crawl errors, duplicate pages, or slow load times. Fixing technical issues is usually the fastest way to see ranking improvements — here's how to approach it.
Identify all technical issues with a full crawl
Before fixing anything, get a complete picture. Crawl your site and export all issues grouped by type. This prevents you from fixing symptoms while ignoring the root cause — for example, fixing individual 404s when the real issue is a broken redirect chain.
Semrush's Site Audit produces a prioritised issue list with clear severity labels and step-by-step fix guidance for each issue type. It's the fastest way to go from 'something is wrong' to 'here's exactly what to fix'.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Fix redirect chains and broken redirects
Redirect chains (A → B → C) dilute link equity and slow your pages down. Every redirect should be a direct 301 from the old URL to the final destination. Use your server's .htaccess or redirect rules to clean these up.
Semrush maps out complete redirect chains visually so you can see exactly where the chain breaks or loops. Fix these before worrying about anything else.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Resolve duplicate content with canonicals
For every page with duplicate or near-duplicate content, add a canonical tag pointing to the primary version. This tells Google which version to index and rank. Common culprits are URL parameters, session IDs, and www vs non-www variations.
Semrush detects canonical issues across your entire site — including pages where the canonical tag points to the wrong URL. Rank Math makes it easy to add canonicals in WordPress without touching code.
Budget alternative: Rank Math Pro (from $5.75/mo)
Improve page speed for your slowest pages
Use PageSpeed Insights to find your slowest pages. The most common fixes are: compress and resize images (use WebP format), defer non-critical JavaScript, enable browser caching, and use a CDN. Each fix compounds.
Semrush's Site Audit Core Web Vitals report identifies which specific pages have speed problems and what's causing them — so you're not guessing at which images or scripts to optimise.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Fix indexation issues — check what's in Google's index
Go to Google Search Console and run a Coverage report. Look for pages marked 'Excluded' or 'Error'. Common issues are: pages blocked by robots.txt, noindex tags left on accidentally, and pages not submitted to the sitemap.
SE Ranking's technical audit pairs well with Search Console data — it flags pages that are blocked from indexing and explains why. Fixing indexation issues is often the fastest route to recovering lost traffic.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)