Most SEO advice on the internet is written for content farms and affiliate sites. If you run a SaaS product or a service business, a lot of it doesn't apply — and some of it actively wastes your time. This post is about the technical SEO layer specifically: the things that suppress your rankings regardless of how good your content is.
We've audited dozens of sites over the past two years. The pattern is remarkably consistent. Companies invest in content, get frustrated that it doesn't rank, then assume they need more content or more backlinks. Usually the real problem is something much more fixable sitting underneath.
1. Crawlability issues are more common than you think
Google can only rank pages it can find and index. A surprising number of sites have configuration errors that quietly block this. The most common we see:
- robots.txt blocking key pages — often introduced accidentally during a staging migration. If your robots.txt disallows
/blog/or/features/, none of those pages will rank regardless of their content quality. - Redirect chains — each hop in a redirect loses a small amount of link equity and slows crawl. Chains of 3+ redirects are a crawl budget problem on larger sites.
- Canonical tag errors — self-referencing canonicals on paginated pages, missing canonicals on duplicate content, or canonicals pointing to the wrong URL variant (http vs https, trailing slash vs none).
- Noindex tags left from development — we see this regularly on Next.js and Astro sites where a noindex meta tag was added during development and never removed in production.
A Screaming Frog crawl combined with Google Search Console's Coverage report will surface all of these. Fix them before doing anything else.
2. Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor — but only above a threshold
Google's Page Experience signals including Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) are a tiebreaker, not a primary ranking factor. A page with a failing LCP won't automatically outrank a faster page just because the content is better. But when two pages are comparable on content and authority, the faster one tends to win — and failing Core Web Vitals metrics are common enough to be worth fixing on their own terms.
The most impactful fixes by effort:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Almost always caused by an unoptimised hero image or a slow server response. Use next/image or astro:assets for automatic WebP conversion and lazy loading. Preload your LCP image with
<link rel="preload">. Target under 2.5s. - CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Most commonly caused by images without explicit width/height attributes, web fonts causing FOUT, or dynamically injected banners. Set dimensions on all images. Use
font-display: swapwith a system font fallback. - INP (Interaction to Next Paint): Replaced FID in 2024 as the interactivity metric. Heavy JavaScript execution on the main thread is the usual culprit — defer non-critical scripts, split large bundles, and avoid long tasks blocking the main thread.
3. Structured data is underused on SaaS sites
Schema.org structured data tells Google exactly what your content is — and eligible content gets rich results in SERPs (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs, sitelinks search box). These increase click-through rate without necessarily changing your rank position.
For a typical SaaS or service business, the most valuable schema types to implement:
- Organization — on your homepage, with name, URL, logo, sameAs links to your social profiles
- SoftwareApplication — on your product page, with applicationCategory, operatingSystem, offers (pricing)
- FAQPage — on any page with a Q&A section; eligible for FAQ rich results in SERPs
- Article / BlogPosting — on blog posts, with author, datePublished, dateModified
- BreadcrumbList — on all interior pages, helps Google understand your site hierarchy
Implement as JSON-LD in your page <head>. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test before deploying. Common errors: missing required fields, incorrect date format (must be ISO 8601), and mismatched URLs between schema and canonical.
4. Internal linking is a free ranking lever most sites ignore
Internal links pass authority between pages and signal to Google which pages are most important. Most sites have a navigation and footer linking to top-level pages, then nothing else — meaning deep content pages are orphaned.
A practical internal linking audit:
- Export all your pages from Screaming Frog
- Filter for pages with zero or one internal links pointing to them
- For each important page with low internal links, find 3–5 existing pages that naturally reference the same topic
- Add contextual links from those pages using descriptive anchor text (not "click here")
This alone can move rankings for pages that Google hasn't been treating as authoritative because no other pages on your site pointed to them.
5. Keyword mapping: one page, one intent
Keyword cannibalism — multiple pages competing for the same search term — is one of the most common issues on sites that have grown organically over time. Google doesn't know which page to rank, so it tends to rank neither well.
Run an Ahrefs or SEMrush crawl, export your keyword rankings, and identify any keyword where two or more of your pages appear. For each conflict:
- If one page is clearly stronger (more links, better content, more traffic): add a canonical from the weaker page to the stronger one, or 301 redirect if the weaker page has no unique value
- If both pages serve different intent for the same keyword: differentiate the content more clearly so Google can understand they answer different questions
The order matters
Technical SEO work should follow a specific sequence. Fix crawlability first — there's no point optimising content Google can't find. Then fix Core Web Vitals so the pages Google does find pass the page experience threshold. Then add structured data for rich result eligibility. Then work on on-page content and internal linking. Then address keyword gaps with new content.
Doing these in the wrong order wastes time. Producing new content while crawlability issues remain means that content may not get indexed at all.
Conclusion
Technical SEO is unglamorous work — it's mostly fixing configuration errors and implementation details rather than producing new content. But it's also the work that unlocks the value of everything else you've already built. If you've invested in content and aren't seeing the organic traffic you expected, the technical layer is the right place to start looking.
If you'd like us to run a technical audit on your site, we're happy to do a free review call — we'll look at your Search Console data and crawl a sample of pages, and give you a clear picture of what's holding your rankings back.
