When traffic stalls, teams rewrite copy first. Often the issue is technical: pages blocked from indexing, duplicate titles, broken canonicals, or a sitemap that lies. Fix the plumbing, then optimize content.
Indexability basics
- Confirm robots meta and X-Robots-Tag aren’t accidentally noindex on public pages.
- Keep robots.txt from blocking CSS/JS that Google needs to render.
- Canonical tags should point to the preferred URL — and match what you want indexed.
- Soft-404s (200 responses with “not found” UI) confuse crawlers; return real 404/410.
Titles, descriptions, and headings
- One unique <title> per indexable URL; keep important keywords early.
- Meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, but they affect CTR — write them on purpose.
- Use a single H1 that matches intent; don’t spam heading levels for style.
- Template pages (blog, product, docs) need unique titles — check for duplicates across the site.
Sitemaps, links, and mobile
- XML sitemap lists only canonical, indexable URLs and stays updated.
- Internal links should reach important pages within a few clicks.
- Mobile layout must be usable — Google indexes with a mobile user agent.
- Fix redirect chains; prefer one clean hop to HTTPS + preferred host.
How to work the list
Audit top landing pages first, then templates that generate thousands of URLs. One broken product template beats twenty perfect blog posts. Re-crawl after deploys that touch head tags or routing.
Health Mesh’s SEO scans surface title/meta issues, structural problems, and related findings so you can fix templates instead of guessing from Search Console alone.