Your content might be excellent. Your backlinks might be growing. But if your website has technical problems that prevent Google from crawling, indexing, and rendering your pages properly, none of that work pays off.
Technical SEO is the infrastructure beneath everything else. I have audited websites since 2018 as an SEO agency in Amman, and the same technical issues appear repeatedly — often on sites that have been paying for SEO services for months without results. Here are the 15 issues I check first.
Crawlability Issues
1. Robots.txt Blocking Important Pages
Your robots.txt file tells Google which parts of your site it can and cannot crawl. I have seen websites where a developer accidentally left Disallow: / in robots.txt after migrating from a staging environment — blocking the entire site from Google for weeks without anyone noticing.
Check: Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser. Make sure important pages and directories are not blocked. Your service pages, product pages, and blog posts should all be crawlable.
2. No XML Sitemap (Or a Broken One)
Your XML sitemap is a map that tells Google every important page on your site. Without it, Google relies on crawling links to discover your content — and will miss pages that are not well-linked internally.
Check: Open yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Does it exist? Does it list all your important pages? Are there broken URLs or pages returning 404 errors? Submit it to Google Search Console if you have not already.
3. Orphan Pages
Pages with no internal links pointing to them. If your own website's navigation does not reach a page, Google will struggle to find it too. Important service pages or blog posts that are not linked from anywhere are invisible to crawlers. Every important page should be reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage.
4. Redirect Chains
When URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C — that is a redirect chain. Each hop loses page authority and slows down crawling. After a site migration or multiple URL changes, these accumulate. Clean them by pointing all redirects directly to the final destination URL.
Indexation Issues
5. Important Pages Not Indexed
If a page is not in Google's index, it does not exist in search results. Pages can be accidentally de-indexed through noindex tags, canonical tag errors, or manual exclusions.
Check: In Google Search Console, go to Pages → "Not indexed" reasons. Look for pages marked "Excluded by noindex tag" or "Alternate page with proper canonical tag" — make sure no important pages are accidentally excluded.
6. Duplicate Content Without Canonicals
When multiple URLs serve the same or very similar content — common on e-commerce sites with product filters and sorting options — Google does not know which version to rank. Without canonical tags pointing to the preferred version, your pages compete against each other. Implement canonical tags pointing each duplicate to the preferred version.
7. Thin Content Pages in the Index
Pages with little or no meaningful content — empty category pages, tag archives, author pages with no posts, or placeholder pages — dilute your site's quality in Google's eyes. Having hundreds of low-quality pages indexed can drag down the performance of your good pages. Add noindex tags to pages that do not deserve a place in Google's results.
Speed and Performance Issues
8. Slow Page Load Time
If your pages take more than 3 seconds to load on mobile, you are losing visitors and rankings. In Jordan, where mobile connections vary in speed, this is especially critical.
Check: Run your homepage and top landing pages through Google PageSpeed Insights. Look at the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score on mobile. If it is above 2.5 seconds, you have work to do.
9. Unoptimized Images
The most common speed killer. Full-resolution images uploaded without compression. A single hero image can be 3–5 MB when it should be under 200 KB. Compress images, resize them to the actual display dimensions, and use WebP format where supported.
10. Render-Blocking Resources
CSS and JavaScript files that must load before the page can display. Defer non-critical JavaScript and inline critical CSS to allow the page to render quickly while secondary resources load in the background.
11. No Browser Caching
When a returning visitor loads your site, their browser should use cached versions of images, CSS, and JavaScript instead of downloading everything again. Without caching headers, every visit is a full download. Run your site through GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights to check.
Structured Data Issues
12. No Schema Markup
Schema markup helps Google understand what your content is about and can earn you rich results — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, business information, product prices displayed directly in search results.
Check: Paste your URL into Google's Rich Results Test. At minimum, implement Organization schema on your homepage and LocalBusiness schema if you have a physical location.
13. Invalid or Incomplete Schema
Having schema markup that contains errors is sometimes worse than having none. Invalid markup can confuse Google's parsers. Use Google's Rich Results Test and fix all errors and warnings — common issues include missing required fields and incorrect data types.
Mobile and UX Issues
14. Not Mobile-Friendly
Google uses mobile-first indexing — it evaluates the mobile version of your site first. If your site does not work properly on mobile, your rankings suffer regardless of how good the desktop version looks. Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and check on an actual phone.
15. High Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Elements jumping around while the page loads — text shifting, buttons moving, images pushing content down. This frustrates users and is a Core Web Vitals metric that affects rankings. Fix by defining explicit width and height for all images and reserving space for dynamic content.
What to Do With This Checklist
Run through all 15 checks. If you find 1–3 issues, you can likely fix them with your developer. If you find 5 or more, your website has technical debt that is actively holding back your rankings.
For a full guide on SEO — technical, on-page, off-page, and local — read my Complete SEO Guide for Businesses in Jordan.
For a real-world example, see how technical SEO improvements helped a specialty coffee brand in Jordan climb Google rankings.
13 years of documented results across Jordan and the Gulf. Explore the full SEO service or book a free strategy call.