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.
It sounds impressive. It sounds complicated. It sounds like something only an expert could handle.
It's mostly bullshit.
The Comfortable Lie
Technical SEO is comfortable because it's safe. You can audit technical issues forever. Run Screaming Frog, get a list of 10,000 "issues," and spend months fixing them.
None of it requires you to confront the real problem: your content isn't good enough.
Fixing a broken canonical tag is easier than admitting your blog posts are forgettable. Optimizing crawl budget is easier than creating something original. Schema markup is easier than having something worth marking up.
When Technical SEO Actually Matters
Technical SEO matters in exactly two situations:
1. You have millions of pages. If you're Amazon, Zillow, or a major news site, yes, crawl budget matters. You have enough scale that inefficiencies compound.
2. Something is actually broken. Your site returns 500 errors. Google can't render your JavaScript. Your pages take 15 seconds to load. Real problems, not theoretical ones.
For everyone else? Technical SEO is a rounding error.
The 80/20 of Technical SEO
Here's what actually matters for 99% of sites:
Don't be slow. If your pages load in under 3 seconds, you're fine. Stop obsessing about shaving milliseconds.
Don't block Google. Check your robots.txt. Make sure your pages are indexable. Done.
Don't have broken pages. Fix your 404s and 500s. Basic hygiene.
Have a sitemap. Generate one automatically. Submit it to Search Console. Forget about it.
That's it. That's 95% of technical SEO for most sites. Everything else is optimization theater. (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.
You don't have enough topical authority.
Nobody links to you because there's nothing worth linking to.
These are hard problems. They require creativity, expertise, and effort. They can't be solved with an audit tool.
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.