Small and medium-sized businesses don’t have the enormous marketing budget of their bigger competitors and corporations. That’s why small and midsize companies have to be more innovative with their marketing strategy in order to compete. There are various marketing approaches such as SEO, however before deciding which approach will work best for your business you need to consider the following components of a strategy:
Crawlability and Indexation First
Before optimising anything else, we check the basics that are easy to assume are fine and often aren’t: whether important pages are actually crawlable, whether the XML sitemap is current and submitted in Search Console, whether robots.txt is accidentally blocking something it shouldn’t, and whether pages that should be indexed actually are. Crawlability and indexation failures are among the most common — and most damaging — technical issues we find on mid-sized business websites, precisely because they’re invisible in day-to-day use of the site; nothing looks broken to a visitor, it’s simply invisible to Google.
Core Web Vitals, in Plain English
Google’s Core Web Vitals measure real user experience, and they now consist of three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures how quickly the main content of a page finishes loading, with a target under 2.5 seconds; Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which measures how responsive the page feels throughout an entire visit (not just on the first click), with a target under 200 milliseconds; and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures how much the page unexpectedly jumps around as it loads.
INP is currently the metric most sites fail, largely because it requires the page to stay responsive throughout an entire session, not just on initial load — heavy third-party scripts (chat widgets, ad tags, analytics tools) and poorly optimised JavaScript are the most common causes. Fixing this is rarely one single change; it’s usually a combination of reducing unnecessary scripts, deferring non-critical JavaScript, and optimising how key components render.
The Most Common Technical Issues We Find
- Duplicate or thin pages competing with each other for the same keyword, diluting ranking potential
- Missing or incorrect canonical tags, confusing which version of a page Google should treat as authoritative
- Slow server response times and unoptimised images inflating page load
- Broken internal links and orphaned pages with no clear path for Google (or users) to find them
- Heavy reliance on client-side JavaScript rendering for content that needs to be crawlable
Structured Data: Helping Machines Understand the Page
Schema markup — structured data added to a page’s code that explicitly tells search engines and AI systems what a piece of content is (a product, a review, a local business, a frequently asked question) — has become increasingly important as more of the discovery layer moves toward AI systems that need to parse content quickly and accurately rather than simply crawl and rank a page. Implemented correctly, schema can also unlock enhanced results in traditional search (star ratings, FAQ accordions, breadcrumbs) that improve click-through even without a ranking change. It’s a relatively low-effort, technical improvement that’s easy to overlook amid bigger conversations about content and links.
On-Page SEO Fundamentals Still Worth Getting Right
Amid all the algorithmic sophistication, some on-page basics remain genuinely important: a clear, unique title tag and meta description per page, the primary keyword appearing naturally in the title, H1 and early in the body content, a logical heading structure that actually reflects the content’s structure (not just bolded text pretending to be a heading), and descriptive, keyword-relevant URLs. None of this works as keyword stuffing — natural, relevant placement matters far more than repetition, and overuse reads as manipulative to both users and search engines.
Why Rendering Method Matters More With AI Crawlers in the Mix
Server-side rendering (or at least ensuring critical content is present in the initial HTML) has always been the safer approach for traditional search crawlability, but it matters even more now that AI systems are also crawling the web to answer questions and generate citations. Most AI crawlers — including those behind tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity — don’t execute JavaScript the way a browser does. If your key content only renders after a script runs, it’s not just a theoretical SEO risk; it’s effectively invisible to a growing category of AI-driven discovery, on top of any impact on traditional search.
A Quick Example
A business might invest heavily in a content and digital PR program for a year, earning genuinely strong coverage and a healthy content library, and still see rankings barely move. An audit turns up the actual cause: a site migration eighteen months earlier left thousands of old URLs returning soft 404s instead of proper redirects, canonical tags pointing to the wrong pages across a large chunk of the site, and INP scores well outside Google’s recommended range on mobile due to a bulky third-party chat widget loading on every page. None of this was visible browsing the site normally — it only showed up in a proper technical crawl and Core Web Vitals report. Fixing it, rather than any further investment in content, unlocked most of the ranking movement that followed.
Common Technical SEO Mistakes to Avoid
- Assuming a site is crawlable and indexed correctly without ever checking Search Console directly
- Leaving orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them, effectively invisible to both users and crawlers
- Loading multiple heavy third-party scripts without ever auditing their actual impact on Core Web Vitals
- Treating a technical SEO audit as a one-off exercise rather than an ongoing part of site maintenance
- Rebuilding or migrating a website without a proper redirect and canonical mapping plan
Technical SEO for AI Crawlers Specifically
Beyond rendering method, a few additional technical considerations matter specifically for AI-driven discovery: making sure llms.txt or equivalent guidance files are considered where relevant, ensuring robots.txt isn’t inadvertently blocking legitimate AI crawlers a business actually wants indexing its content, and structuring content with clear headings and direct answers near the top of a page — the format AI systems tend to extract most reliably when generating a summary or citation. None of this replaces good traditional technical SEO; it sits alongside it as an additional lens to check a site against.
Our Process
We start with a full technical audit — crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals, and on-page fundamentals — then prioritise fixes by impact and effort, the same way we approach conversion rate optimisation in paid media. High-impact, low-effort technical fixes (a missing canonical tag, an easily optimised image set) get addressed first; larger architectural issues (a JavaScript-heavy rebuild, a site restructure) get planned and staged properly rather than rushed. Technical SEO isn’t a one-off project either — search engines and AI crawlers keep evolving how they read a site, so we treat monitoring as ongoing, not a box ticked once.
If your content and backlink strategy look solid on paper but rankings still aren’t moving, there’s a reasonable chance the technical foundation underneath it needs attention first. Talk to Medium Marketing about a technical SEO audit.
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Ethan Caldwell
Reflective Blogger
Dinesh Arasaratnam
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