STUDIO NOTES / SEARCH & DIGITAL PRESENCE
Technical SEO: What to Check and How to Prioritise Fixes
A useful technical audit explains what was tested, which pages are affected and how to check the fix. A list of warnings without that context is difficult to act on.
Start with the pages that matter
List the pages intended to bring people into the business: services, useful guides and genuine case studies. Then distinguish those from presentation exports, duplicate URLs and other supporting files. A page can be useful to a customer without needing its own place in search results.
Check HTTP response codes, the sitemap, robots instructions and canonical URLs. These answer different questions. A successful response means a URL loads; it does not confirm that a search engine has indexed it. Search Console’s URL Inspection provides additional evidence about Google’s handling of an individual URL.
Make the information understandable
Each important page should explain its actual subject through a useful title, heading and opening paragraph. For a service business, visitors need to understand what is included, who the service is for and what to do next. Internal links should make related services and supporting examples easy to find.
Structured data should describe those same visible facts. Business details, service relationships and breadcrumbs can add clarity, but valid JSON alone does not prove search eligibility or guarantee a rich result.
Measure an asset before replacing it
In a real Befound review, the approved illustration crop was displayed through an SVG that embedded a larger raster image. A dedicated WebP of the visible crop reduced the measured asset from 569,060 bytes to 140,570 bytes—about 75%—while retaining the selected composition.
That comparison measures image bytes, not Core Web Vitals. LCP, INP and CLS still need appropriate lab or real-user measurements. The practical lesson is to identify what is being transferred and preserve the approved design while reducing unnecessary payload.
Give every priority an acceptance check
- Observation: name the tested issue and the affected URL.
- Action: describe the recommended change and who owns it.
- Validation: define what should be true after implementation.
- Measurement: separate completed fixes from changes in search traffic or enquiries.
Work through the important issues first, then review the evidence again. Avoid treating every automated warning as equally urgent.