Most websites don't lose rankings because of one big problem — they lose them to a handful of quiet technical issues that compound over time. Here are the seven we find most often, and how to fix each.
1. Broken internal links and 404s
A single broken link in a shared header or footer multiplies across every page, and search engines treat it as a quality signal. Crawl your site (Ahrefs, Screaming Frog or Search Console) and fix or redirect every 404. Pay special attention to links in templates — one bad link there breaks dozens of pages at once.
2. Slow pages (poor Core Web Vitals)
Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor. The usual culprits are huge unoptimised images, render-blocking scripts and no caching. Compress images (and serve WebP), lazy-load below-the-fold media, and check your scores in PageSpeed Insights.
3. Missing or duplicate title tags & meta descriptions
Every page needs a unique, descriptive title and meta description. Duplicates confuse search engines about which page to rank and waste your click-through potential in the results.
4. No structured data
Schema markup (Organization, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, Article, Product) is what earns rich results — star ratings, FAQs and breadcrumbs in the SERP. It's invisible to users but a major edge in click-through rate.
5. Orphan pages
An "orphan" page has no internal links pointing to it, so crawlers (and users) struggle to find it and it rarely ranks. Make sure every important page is linked from your navigation, footer or related content.
6. A missing or broken sitemap & robots.txt
Your sitemap.xml should list every indexable URL, and your robots.txt should reference it with an absolute URL. Then submit the sitemap in Google Search Console so new pages get found fast.
7. No canonical tags or hreflang
Canonical tags prevent duplicate-content issues; hreflang tells Google which version of a page to show in which country. If you serve multiple regions (say the UK, US and Ireland), getting hreflang right keeps the right page ranking in the right market.
Want a second opinion?
Our SEO services start with a technical audit that catches exactly these issues. If you're also planning a new site, our web development builds are SEO-ready from day one.