I was on a call with a marketing manager at an Irish B2B company last year. Their site had been live for two years. They’d published blog posts consistently. They’d paid an agency to “do SEO” for six months. Organic traffic was flat.
When we ran a crawl, we found 847 pages with duplicate title tags, 23% of the site blocked from indexation by a misconfigured robots.txt, and a sitemap pointing at redirect URLs. Google had been trying to index the site for two years and couldn’t make sense of it.
The content was fine. The foundation was broken.
What technical SEO actually is
Technical SEO is the work that makes a website readable, crawlable, and understandable to search engines. It’s not keywords. It’s not links. It’s the infrastructure underneath everything else — the signals that tell Google what your pages are about, which ones matter, how fast they load, and whether they’re worth ranking.
Most businesses don’t think about it until something is visibly broken. By then, they’ve usually lost months of ranking potential.
The five technical problems we see most often on Irish WordPress sites
1. Indexation problems
Pages that should be ranking are blocked — sometimes by a noindex tag left over from a site build, sometimes by a misconfigured robots.txt, sometimes because the page was never added to the sitemap. If Google can’t find it, it can’t rank it.
2. Duplicate content
WordPress creates category archives, tag archives, and pagination pages by default. Without proper canonical tags, you can end up with dozens of near-identical URLs competing with each other and splitting your authority. Google doesn’t know which one to rank — so it ranks none of them well.
3. Slow load times
Speed is a ranking factor. Google measures Core Web Vitals — LCP, FID/INP, and CLS — and uses them directly in rankings. The average Irish business website we audit loads in over 6 seconds on mobile. Google’s threshold for a “good” LCP is 2.5 seconds.
4. Broken internal links
When you redesign a site or change URL structures without setting up proper redirects, you break the internal link graph. Pages that used to pass authority to each other now point at 404s or redirect chains. Google follows those links and finds dead ends.
5. Missing structured data
Schema markup tells Google explicitly what your content is about — what type of business you are, where you’re located, what services you offer, what your reviews say. Without it, Google has to guess. With it, you’re more likely to appear in rich results and local search.
How to find out if your site has technical SEO issues
Start with Google Search Console. Look at the Coverage report — any pages marked as “Excluded” or “Error” are a problem. Check the Core Web Vitals report — if you have pages in the “Poor” category, they’re being penalised. Run a free Lighthouse audit in Chrome on your most important pages.
If you want a complete picture, a professional technical SEO audit will surface issues that aren’t visible in these tools — crawl budget waste, duplicate content at scale, structured data errors, and infrastructure problems that only show up when you look at the full crawl data.
We offer a Discovery Audit for €1,500 that covers technical SEO alongside performance and on-page optimisation. If you proceed with remediation work, the audit fee is credited against the project cost.
If the audit surfaces more issues than you can realistically fix in-house, hiring a specialist SEO agency Ireland team is usually the faster route.
