Technical SEO Is a Distraction
You don't have a technical SEO problem. You have a content problem. Stop hiding behind crawl budgets and schema markup and make something people actually want to read.
There's a certain type of SEO who loves to talk about technical SEO - crawl budgets, XML sitemaps, hreflang tags, canonical URLs, JavaScript rendering, log file analysis, the whole arcane vocabulary of server-side mysteries that sounds impressive and sounds complicated and sounds like something only an expert could possibly handle, which is precisely the point.
It's mostly bullshit.
The Comfortable Lie
Technical SEO is comfortable because it's safe - you can audit technical issues forever, running Screaming Frog to generate a list of 10,000 "issues" that you can then spend months fixing, all while feeling productive and professional and like you're really doing serious SEO work - but none of it requires you to confront the real problem, which is that your content isn't good enough.
Fixing a broken canonical tag is so much easier than admitting your blog posts are forgettable, and optimizing crawl budget feels so much more technical and impressive than creating something original, and implementing schema markup is so much more comfortable than confronting the uncomfortable truth that you don't have anything worth marking up in the first place.
When Technical SEO Actually Matters
Technical SEO matters in exactly two situations, and if you don't fall into one of these categories you can safely ignore approximately 90% of what gets written about technical SEO:
1. You have millions of pages - if you're Amazon, Zillow, or a major news site with a constantly churning inventory of content, yes, crawl budget matters, because you have enough scale that inefficiencies compound and small problems become big problems through sheer multiplication.
2. Something is actually broken - your site returns 500 errors, Google can't render your JavaScript, your pages take 15 seconds to load on a fast connection - real problems, not theoretical ones, not the kind of "issues" that audit tools flag because they need to justify their subscription fees.
For everyone else - which is to say, for the vast majority of websites and businesses - technical SEO is a rounding error, a distraction from the things that actually matter, a convenient excuse to avoid the harder work of creating content worth finding.
The 80/20 of Technical SEO
Here's what actually matters for 99% of sites, the whole of technical SEO distilled down to a list so short you could fit it on a napkin with room to spare:
Don't be slow - if your pages load in under 3 seconds on a decent connection, you're fine, and you should stop obsessing about shaving milliseconds because the return on that time investment approaches zero.
Don't block Google - check your robots.txt, make sure your pages are indexable, and then move on with your life because that's all there is to it.
Don't have broken pages - fix your 404s and 500s, which is basic hygiene that you should be doing anyway regardless of SEO.
Have a sitemap - generate one automatically, submit it to Search Console, and then forget about it because there's nothing more to do.
That's it - that's 95% of technical SEO for most sites, and everything else is optimization theater, busywork that makes you feel like you're doing something important while accomplishing nothing. (If you need more structure, here's the only checklist that matters.)
The Inconvenient Truth
If your site isn't ranking, it's almost certainly not because of technical issues - it's because your content doesn't answer the query better than what's already ranking, or you don't have enough topical authority in your space, or nobody links to you because there's nothing worth linking to, which are all hard problems that require creativity and expertise and genuine effort and can't be solved by running an audit tool and checking off a list of recommendations.
These problems are uncomfortable to confront because confronting them requires admitting that the issue isn't some obscure technical setting buried in your server configuration - the issue is that you haven't created anything good enough to deserve ranking, and no amount of schema markup or canonical tag optimization is going to fix that.
Technical SEO is the organized sock drawer of digital marketing. It feels productive. It looks impressive. It changes almost nothing.
Stop hiding behind technical fixes. Make something worth finding.