Technical SEO is full of recommendations, but not all of them deserve the same priority. A task that’s critical for one website may not be worth the effort on another.
Instead of chasing green audit scores or clearing every warning in your SEO tool, focus on the activities that will have the greatest impact. The best technical SEOs prioritize what’s needed over what’s most obvious.
Why prioritizing technical SEO is important
When you’re considering a technical SEO task, it’s important to prioritize it against the other work competing for your time.
You have limited time
You have limited time and resources. It isn’t possible to tackle every task on your to-do list, so you need to identify which activities deserve the highest priority.
Focus on the activities that will deliver the biggest results for the time you invest.
You have limited developer resources
Technical SEO tasks often require help from your development team. That means you’ll need to secure time in their sprint to implement them. Anyone who’s worked in SEO for any length of time knows how valuable that resource is.
Make sure every request is worth your developers’ time and the tradeoff of other work they won’t be able to complete.
You need to show impact
Every technical SEO task you take on should have a clear expected ROI. That isn’t always easy to quantify, but you should be able to explain why you’re doing it and how you expect it to move the needle.
Once you can answer those questions, you can start prioritizing technical SEO tasks against one another.
Dig deeper: Where to focus technical SEO when you can’t do it all
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How to tell if you might be wasting time
Rather than labeling specific tasks as time-wasters, consider how to determine whether a task is worth your time on your website.
If you’re doing it to check a box
If your only reason for carrying out a technical SEO activity is to clear alerts in your SEO tool or because you saw it recommended on LinkedIn, stop. Very few, if any, technical SEO activities should be a top priority for every website.
If you don’t have a reason for doing it beyond “SEO best practice,” I’d argue it isn’t something you should dive into. Focus instead on activities that will improve your website’s performance for users and search bots.
You can’t quantify the impact
This is perhaps the most important reason to park a technical SEO task: You don’t know what impact it will have.
If you want people to buy into your SEO plans, you need to show why they’re financially worthwhile.
That might mean improving revenue, reducing churn, or increasing qualified traffic.
For example, if you’re considering improving a page’s load speed, don’t make “reduce page load time” the goal. Instead, consider what faster load times could achieve for your organic performance and business goals.
If you work on an ecommerce site, you may know that faster load times can improve conversion rates. That’s a much stronger reason to take on the work than simply achieving a “good” page speed score.
By making conversion rate improvement the goal, you can estimate the potential financial impact. For example, if a page converts at an average rate of X% and generates $X in annual revenue, increasing the conversion rate to X+1% could generate up to $Y in additional revenue.
You don’t know how to measure success
If you aren’t sure how you’ll measure the impact of an activity, that may be a sign it shouldn’t be a priority.
Examples of work that can be a waste of time
Any technical SEO activity can be a time-waster. Technical SEO is about optimizing your website to provide the best possible experience for users and search bots. That means what is a waste of time for one website may be a necessary activity for another.
That said, there are several technical SEO activities I’ve seen appear on countless checklists despite offering little discernible benefit. That doesn’t mean you should remove them from your to-do list. It means they should only be there if they’ll solve a problem your website actually has.
Core Web Vitals work when they aren’t that bad
Yes, I know Core Web Vitals scores are important. I just don’t think they’re so important that you should continually optimize them. As long as your CWVs are in the “good” range, pushing them further into that range is likely to deliver diminishing returns.
I doubt spending developer time to shave a few milliseconds off your Largest Contentful Paint score will have much impact on rankings or user behavior.
Reserve Core Web Vitals optimization for pages that genuinely aren’t meeting targets. These are the pages users struggle to load or that negatively affect usability.
Get your scores into the “good” range before investing time chasing incremental improvements.
Removing redirects when you don’t have chains
I understand the perfectionist approach to redirects. No one likes running a crawl and seeing 301 status codes reported. However, the real concern with redirects is how they affect search bots’ ability to crawl your website.
If you aren’t seeing redirect loops, chains with more than five hops, redirects to irrelevant pages, or enough redirects to affect bots’ ability to crawl most of your website, you can probably leave them alone.
Sure, if you have a few spare minutes and you’re already in your CMS, you can update links so they point directly to the final destination instead of a redirecting URL. Realistically, though, there are only a few situations where this belongs near the top of your to-do list.
Leave redirect cleanup until it has a measurable impact on your site’s performance.
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Optimizing bot crawling when your content is already crawlable
There’s a lot of misinformation about crawl budget. For most websites, it isn’t an issue. Large enterprise websites often need to optimize crawl paths, but smaller websites usually don’t.
If your website has developed spider traps or is allowing bots to crawl pages you don’t want indexed, that’s worth addressing. Otherwise, if Google Search Console shows Google is crawling your important pages, you can probably move crawl budget optimization lower on your priority list.
Fixing every 404 status
Like fixing every 301 redirect, eliminating every link to a 404 page is often more about tidying up than solving a meaningful problem.
404s are a normal and expected part of a website. If they’re hurting the user experience, absolutely fix them. If you’re simply trying to clear the list of 404s in your crawling tool, it can probably wait until you have time.
Removing obsolete metadata like ‘meta keywords’
I know no one is adding meta keywords anymore. That’s good. It also doesn’t mean you need to spend precious time removing them. Just leave them.
Chances are they’re so old they aren’t even giving your competitors useful hints about the keywords you’re targeting. We’ve all moved on from meta keywords, so you can, too.
Routine disavow file maintenance
Many SEOs will tell you they don’t use disavow files at all. I agree their usefulness has diminished significantly. There may be times when you want to submit or update one.
You may also want to audit it to make sure nothing inappropriate was submitted in the past. However, I struggle to think of a reason why routinely updating a disavow file on a scheduled basis would be productive.
Clearing audit tool issues
Not every issue your SEO tool flags is an emergency. Remember that SEO tools lack the context of your broader strategy and your website’s foundation.
You may have intentionally blocked pages in your robots.txt file or returned 404 status codes for some pages. That doesn’t mean they’re problems or that you need to fix them.
Your auditing tools should support your technical SEO work, not dictate it. You don’t need to clear every issue they report to have a technically healthy website. Don’t let the red lights and warnings distract you from more meaningful technical SEO work.
Dig deeper: How to make your SEO strategy more commercially aware
What to do instead
Instead of working through a technical SEO checklist, spend that time on projects that will have a greater impact.
How do you know which tasks are worth doing? Any technical SEO work should meet at least one of these three criteria.
It directly impacts revenue or business goals
It’s much easier to get buy-in and recognition for your technical SEO work when you can tie it directly to revenue or business goals.
That means drawing a clear line between the work you’re doing and a business outcome. For example, if you’re improving slow-loading pages, you can connect that work to higher conversion rates. That’s a much stronger indicator of business value than simply making a page load faster.
It creates a foundation for work that supports business goals
Technical SEO is worth the investment when it enables other work that will move the needle.
For example, it may be difficult to show how optimizing crawl paths on an enterprise website directly affects business goals. However, you can connect improved crawl paths to revenue-driving pages being discovered and crawled, ensuring SEO tests on those pages are found and processed.
Without crawl optimization, search bots may never see those SEO tests, making the work ineffective. Activities that enable other important SEO initiatives are valuable in their own right.
It prepares your website for AI-driven search
A final criterion for meaningful technical SEO work is whether it prepares your website for future changes. Some work may not deliver immediate returns but could pay off over time. Preparing your website for AI-powered search experiences is one example.
You may not be getting much traffic or many conversions from AI agents yet, but there’s a strong possibility that this is where the web is heading. Preparing for that shift can feel risky because it’s speculative. However, when done well, this work is also likely to improve your website for today’s search bots and users.
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Avoid busywork, prioritize impact
Technical SEO work can be time-consuming, involve multiple teams and stakeholders, and ultimately make the difference between a well-performing website and a poor one.
The key is making sure your time and energy are spent on activities that produce meaningful results. Treat technical SEO like any other business investment: prioritize the work that’s most likely to produce meaningful results.
Dig deeper: Why proving technical SEO ROI is so difficult
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