Technical SEO problems have a funny way of causing trouble long before anyone realises what’s going on. Your content might be brilliant, your design might look sharp, and your ads might be driving clicks, but if Google can’t crawl or understand your pages properly, the whole thing starts to wobble.
A lot of businesses only discover the issue when rankings drop or traffic plateaus, which is usually the point when they call in an SEO services agency in London to take a proper look. But you don’t need to be an expert to spot the most common issues early. Here are the five problems that pop up more often than you’d think, and the straightforward fixes that usually sort them out.
1. Your Site Still Isn’t Using HTTPS
There are still websites loading without HTTPS. Modern browsers warn users instantly that a page “might not be secure,” which is hardly the warm welcome anyone wants. Google also gives preference to secure sites, so it’s both a trust issue and an SEO one.
How to fix it: Add an SSL certificate (your hosting provider can usually help), update your internal links to the HTTPS version, and make sure every old HTTP page redirects properly. It’s one of the quickest wins you’ll ever get.
2. Important Pages Aren’t Being Indexed
There’s nothing more frustrating than publishing a page, checking Google… and finding nothing. Sometimes pages are accidentally set to “noindex,” sometimes they’re blocked in robots.txt, and occasionally Google simply hits crawl errors it can’t get past.
How to fix it: Pop into Google Search Console, run a URL inspection, and look for any crawl or indexing warnings. Remove any accidental noindex tags and resubmit your sitemap. Most of the time, this sorts the issue quickly.
3. Your Site Is Slower Than It Looks
You can have the nicest design in the world, but if your pages drag their feet, users won’t stick around. Big images, plugin-heavy builds, messy themes, and leftover scripts all add up, and Google notices.
How to fix it: Compress your images, cut out unnecessary plugins, tidy up your scripts, and enable caching through your host or a lightweight plugin. A quick speed test every month or so helps catch new issues before they turn into ranking problems.
4. Duplicate Pages You Didn’t Know You Had
Duplicate content often sneaks in quietly. Multiple category filters, slightly different URLs, print versions of pages, or CMS quirks can all produce duplicates without you ever creating them manually. Google doesn’t “penalise” duplicate content, but it does get confused about what to rank.
How to fix it: Use canonical tags to tell Google the correct version, merge or redirect pages when needed, and try to keep your URL structure tidy. This alone can help stabilise rankings across sections of your website.
5. Broken Links Everywhere
Broken links frustrate users and waste crawl budget. Old content, deleted pages, and outdated external references all add up. Most sites develop dozens of broken links over time without anyone noticing.
How to fix it: Run a broken-link audit and repair anything important. Remove or update old URLs, and redirect deleted pages to the closest relevant alternative. Small cleanup jobs like this keep both Google and your users moving smoothly through the site.
Where AI Can Actually Help
Most people run a manual audit once in a while and hope for the best. But modern AI tools can spot technical issues before they turn into bigger problems, especially on large websites. They’re great at:
- Finding patterns in crawl data
- Flagging structural issues early
- Analysing log files
- Predicting which technical fixes will have the biggest impact
It’s why many businesses now lean on the best AI marketing agency in UK for large SEO audits or ongoing monitoring. You still need human judgment, but AI makes the detective work a lot easier.
Technical SEO doesn’t need to be scary, and you don’t need to fix everything at once. Start with the basics: security, indexing, speed, avoiding duplicates, and fixing broken links. Once those are under control, everything else becomes much smoother.
