Technical SEO for Non-Tech Marketers: 5 Site Fixes You Can’t Afford to Ignore

You’ve created helpful, high-quality content. But your site still isn’t ranking. This can be because of technical SEO issues, the behind-the-scenes factors that control how search engines crawl, index, and display your pages. 

In this guide, you’ll learn five technical fixes that non-technical marketers can handle to improve your website. 

5 Technical SEO Fixes for Non-Tech Marketers

1. Issues with Core Web Vitals Scores

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google uses to measure the visual stability, interactivity, and speed of a webpage. A good page experience is one of Google’s ranking factors. If users enjoy their time on your page (which Google tracks through its HEART framework), Google rewards your content with higher rankings. 

Google’s Core Web Vitals are: 

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes the largest elements on your page to appear on the user’s screen. A fast LCP page should show all elements within 2.5 seconds. 
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): INP measures how quickly your page responds to user interactions, such as when they click a link or tap a button. A good INP should take 200 milliseconds or less. 
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how elements on your page move around as it loads (visual stability). If your page moves around a lot as it loads, you get a high CLS score (which is bad). A good CLS score is less than 0.1.

These metrics shape your site’s first impression. If your page stutters, shifts, or stalls, users may bounce, Google will notice, and it’ll increase your bounce rate. 

What to do: 

• Check Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) to know if you have issues:

Log in to Google PageSpeed Insights, and enter your page’s URL.

You can enter the website URL or the URL of a specific page. The tool then assesses and generates a report of your page’s performance, including LCP, INP, CLS, and other metrics. You can also switch the tabs to see your results for desktop and mobile.

The results are easy to understand; scores are color-coded (green is good, yellow needs improvement, and red is poor). Then you can scroll down for more details on what you need to fix. 

• Use Google’s Lighthouse Audit

A Lighthouse audit simulates how your page loads and generates a performance report. It’s basically a lab test for webpages. 

The report indicates whether you have passed or failed your Core Web Vitals metrics. You can run an audit through DevTools or use Chrome’s built-in “Inspect” – “Lighthouse” option. 

Here’s an example of an audit run through DevTools:

• Google Search Console

If you have access to your site’s Google Search Console, check the Core Web Vitals report there. 

It shows data on how real users experience your pages over time and flags slow and unstable URLs, which makes the report more in-depth.

This is an example from Backlinko: 

Now, how do you fix these issues? Here are a few general fixes for you: 

If you have an LCP problem, your page isn’t loading fast. Do these: 

• Compress large images on your page without compromising on quality. You can use TinyPNG for this.
• Use properly sized and responsive images for future content and pages. If your website is designed to accommodate a specific image ratio, always upload images at that size. 
• Try lazy loading, where the text loads first before the images, and the images load as the user scrolls.

If you have a high CLS score, it means your page elements jump or shift while loading its content. This throws off users and affects trust. To reduce CLS: 

• Set fixed height and width for all images, videos, and ad containers. Avoid auto-sizing. 

Tip: Always upload images in the size you want them to appear. Don’t rely on the page to resize them.

• Use layout tools (like Elementor or Webflow) that let you reserve space for images before they load. 
• If you use WordPress, you can also use an optimization plugin like WP Rocket or Perfmatters to preload webfront to stop the layout from jumping while the font render. 

2. Mobile Friendliness 

Over 60% of organic traffic comes from mobile. This means that over 60% of people who search for businesses or answers online do it from their mobile devices. 

Google prioritizes these mobile users and now uses mobile-first indexing. Basically, this means that it ranks your page based on how responsive it is on mobile, even for desktop searchers. In other words, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices (but is optimized for desktop searches), it still won’t rank on desktop devices.

What to do: 

Check if your website is mobile-friendly: 

• Run a Mobile-Friendly Test

Log in to a mobile-friendly tool, and enter your site’s URL.

It’ll show you a percentage of your mobile-friendliness and areas for improvement. 

You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to analyze your mobile page performance. It checks your page and provides a detailed analysis of your site’s performance on mobile.

When this is done, you can make changes. 

• Use font sizes that readers won’t have to zoom in to read.

If users have to squint or zoom in to read, your text is too small. Change your font size so people can read your content easily.  

• Make your buttons clickable. 

Make your CTAs tap-friendly. You can do this by placing buttons where thumbs naturally rest (like the middle or lower part of the screen). You should also use at least 44px by 44px for button size, and leave enough space around them so users don’t tap the wrong one. 

For example, here’s how, MerryMaids designed theirs: 

And don’t forget the previous advice: 

• Reduce your image sizes using TinyPNG, so your pages can load fast. 
• Rather than uploading a video to your webpage, which can cause it to load slowly, upload the image to YouTube and embed a link to the video on your website. 
• Ensure users know where to click next when they’re on your page. Again, make your buttons visible so users know how to get from an “Add to cart” page to a “checkout” page. 

Read more: Mobile SEO: Why It Matters More Than Ever in 2025

3. Use HTTPS on your website 

Google labels non-HTTPS pages as “Not Secure,” which can scare away visitors, especially if your site collects forms, requires passwords, or accepts payments. 

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a secure version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It encrypts communication between your website and the user’s browser to protect their sensitive information, such as payment details, social security numbers, and other personal data. 

Browsers like Chrome even warn users about non-HTTPS websites.

To fix it, check if your website uses HTTPS (your address should start with https:// and display a lock icon that provides more information about the page’s connection). 

If it does, you’re secure. 

If it doesn’t, here’s what you can do: 

• Get an SSL/TLS certificate from trusted providers like Let’s Encrypt or GoGetSSL and install it on your server. 
• Set up redirects for all your HTTP pages to HTTPS through a 301 redirect (you can use a plugin or a tool on your hosting platform). Google and visitors are redirected to a more secure page, while you retain your content. 

You can also read more on how to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS. 

4. Crawl Errors

Search engines crawl websites to find and index pages to appear in search results. If Googlebot can’t crawl or index your site properly, your content doesn’t rank, no matter how good it is.

What to do: 

• Audit your webpages with Google Search Console: 

Google Search Console has several features that show how your pages are being indexed.

Log in to your GSC account, go to the Indexing section, and then Page Indexing report.

The Page Indexing report shows you a list of “Not indexed” pages that Google could not crawl successfully because of errors. You can analyze the crawl errors for each page with the URL Inspection Tool and correct them. 

GSC also has a Google Crawl stats feature that shows you how Google has crawled your website in the last 90 days. 

To find it, go to Settings, scroll down to the Crawling section, and open the OPEN REPORTS link next to the crawl stats.

It generates a detailed report on how Google crawls your website and the errors it encounters along the way. 

Neil Patel breaks it down even further here.

If you find any error, here’s how to fix it: 

• For a 404 (Not Found error), it could be that you’ve updated the page and the link is broken; set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new relevant page. 

If the page was removed and there is no direct replacement, you can leave it as a 404, but ensure that no important inbound links are pointing there.

• For redirect issues, look out for loops like: Page A → Page B → Page C → back to Page A. This confuses crawlers and can block indexing altogether. Use a redirect checker (like Ahrefs Site Audit) to trace the path and eliminate extra hops. Then update the redirects to go directly to the final destination page. 
• Check your robots.txt and meta tags, and make sure you’re not accidentally disallowing or “noindex”-ing pages that should be indexed. For example, a misconfigured robots.txt file can prevent Google from crawling entire sections of your site (because it’s not configured to allow search engines to crawl some pages on your website).

Once you have fixed the crawl errors, test the affected pages using Google Search Console’s (GSC) URL Inspection tool.

5. Structured Data (Schema markup)

Schema markup is a code that you add to your page to help Google understand your content better. 

In the image above, this code is telling search engines that the business (whose website it is used on) is a restaurant business with the name “Sunset Grill & Bistro.” The code also has details about the address, postal code, telephone number, and star rating. This means that when a user searches for “Mediterranean cuisine restaurants in Ocean City,” Sunset Grill & Bistro will have more detailed information available before the searcher clicks on their page. 

Sunset Grill & Bistro is a fictional name, but this is what the SERP would look like: 

Google uses this code to give extra information to help searchers make informed decisions before clicking on a website in the search results. 

If you’re a small business without schema markup, you may lose out on clicks that may come to your website simply because Google could not display your star ratings, reviews or price range like it did in the above image. This is backed by data: a study found that rich results get 58% of clicks versus 41% for non-rich results. 

So, here’s what you can do: 

The first step is to decide how to add schema markup to your webpages. There are three main ways to do this: 

• JSON-LD: This is a JavaScript format that encodes structured data into the head or footer of your page. Google recommends JSON-LD because it’s easy to generate and maintain. 

Here’s an example of JSON-LD: 

<script type=”application/ld+json”> { “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “person”, “name”: “Adam Heitzman”, “jobTitle”: “SEO professional”, “url”: “https://adamheitzman.com” } </script>

This is an author schema saying, “This is a person whose name is Adam Heitzman, and the job title is ‘SEO professional.’ His website is adamheitzman.com.”

• Microdata: This format embeds the structured data directly into HTML content. It labels parts of your content with special attributes to make them readable to search engines. This one is a bit harder to implement. 
• RDFa: This is similar to Microdata, but it’s more flexible when mixing vocabulary. RDFa is used to describe various types of content, entities, and their relationships on the web. 

In the example below, the first block uses Schema.org vocabulary to describe a person and their job, while the second block uses FOAF (Friend of a Friend) vocabulary to describe the same person’s blog homepage. RDFa allows you to specify multiple vocabularies via attributes like vocab and prefix, so you can combine them: 

<div vocab=”http://schema.org/” typeof=”Person”>

  <span property=”name”>John Doe</span>

  <span property=”jobTitle”>Software Engineer</span>

  <span property=”worksFor” typeof=”Organization”>

    <span property=”name”>ABC Company</span>

  </span>

</div>

<div vocab=”http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/” about=”#me”>

  My blog is called <a rel=”homepage” href=”http://example.org/blog/”>Understanding Semantics</a>.

</div>

With this, a product page marked up with RDFa might show the product name, price, star rating, and review count in Google’s search listing, to improve visibility and click-through rates. 

When you decide on the language for your schema, select a schema type that matches your page’s content. You can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to find the appropriate markup. 

So, log in to the website, enter the page’s URL you want to mark up, and select a data type: 

Then, highlight the section you want to markup. The next step will show your page and data items to markup side by side: 

In this example, I tagged the writer as the author, and the topic as the title. I will also do the same for other critical elements of the page, like the date published and images. 

Once this is done, tap on ‘Create HTML’ in the right corner of your screen to generate the markup code in JSON-LD format: 

After you generate the markup code, copy and paste it into your HTML’s <head> or <footer> section. If you use a WordPress website, you can install a plugin like Yoast SEO or RankMath to add the code to your website. 

Now that you’ve added the code to your website, test the schema markup with Google’s Rich Results Test tool to make sure it works. 

You can paste the page’s URL or the code you generated earlier. The results will show the type of schema markup on the page and other important information, like this: 

Conclusion 

All these don’t require you to write a line of code or hire a developer. You can click around on your website to make these fixes, which will likely improve your website’s technical SEO health. 

If you find that your website still needs an in-depth technical overhaul or you want to free up your team’s time, consider reaching out to our experts.