What should a technical SEO audit fix first? If you ask Eva Mermingi, a freelance technical SEO and co-founder of the Athens SEO conference, the answer is duplication, then links, then indexation, and Core Web Vitals come after all of it. She laid out her full priority order on her episode of the Unscripted SEO podcast. Here’s that order as something you can run on your next audit, with the fixes she pushes because they’re cheap and the findings she leaves alone.
The audit order, on one page
Eva spent five years at agencies in the UK working on sites close to a million URLs before going freelance in Greece. Her order comes from that work, not from a tool’s default severity scores.
| Bucket | What goes in it | Why it sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Fix first | Duplication; internal links that hit redirects; orphan pages; indexation gaps | Highest impact, and duplication is often relatively easy to solve |
| Fix fast | Canonicals; schema; redirected links in the main navigation or footer | Small implementation, wide reach |
| Fix later | Core Web Vitals | Only after keyword targeting and the basics are right |
| Mention, don’t push | A normal number of 404s on unimportant pages; a few harmless URL parameters | Healthy and normal on a real site |
Fix first: duplication, links and indexation
“Usually the first things that I do check are obviously duplication,” Eva said. Next come redirected links and links in general, including orphan pages, because in her experience anything link-related has one of the biggest technical impacts. Then indexation: is everything that should be indexed actually indexed?
When indexation looks wrong, she doesn’t start with a fix. She starts with the cause. You check whether the pages are duplicates, whether a robots.txt rule is keeping Googlebot out, or whether they’re crawled but not indexed, and Google Search Console tells you which. “It really, really depends on what’s actually causing it for me to actually give a recommendation.” The same diagnosis can point the other way. Sometimes too much of the site is indexed, and index bloat is the real problem dragging attention away from the pages that convert. If you want a step-by-step version of the check, our SOP on how to validate the not-indexed bucket before you fix it walks through it.
Fix fast: three changes with a small footprint
Eva’s honest caveat is that content changes usually ship faster than technical ones, especially at enterprise companies. Some technical fixes are still cheap:
- Canonicals. “Canonicals are quite easy to fix because it’s just very, very easy implementation.”
- Schema. Start with homepage and organization schema, built bespoke from schema.org, then reviews and FAQ. Prioritize the types that can earn rich results.
- Redirected links in the nav and footer. One edit in a sitewide element clears the redirect from every page. In-content redirects take far longer to update by hand, so these go higher in her report.
Fix later: Core Web Vitals
Whenever Eva runs competitor analysis, she checks the speed of the top 10 results for the keyword. In the SERPs she has looked at, six to eight of the ten fail Core Web Vitals. That’s the evidence behind her line on the episode:
“Core Web Vitals won’t save you, it won’t rank if you don’t have the other basics when it comes to SEO.”
Jeremy Rivera, who hosts the show, treats speed as a tiebreaker with one exception: when a site takes six to twelve seconds to load and large parts of it aren’t getting indexed, speed has moved into the “fix first” bucket. If you suspect that’s you, the SOP for finding global page speed fixes by sampling five pages is a quick way to find out.
Mention, don’t push: the 404 report
Eva used to want every 404 cleared. Not anymore.
“But I find it quite healthy for a website to have like an X amount of 404s. It’s quite healthy. It’s normal.”
Her conditions: the page isn’t important and the count isn’t high. The same goes for a few URL parameters that aren’t causing problems. She notes them and moves on. That view is also the counterpoint in our roundup of 7 quick wins hiding in your last SEO crawl.
Deliver the audit like a plan, not a verdict
The last step isn’t technical. Eva learned early that clients want the truth, but how you say it decides whether anything gets fixed. “You think that tech audits is all about data, but no, it’s actually how you deliver the data as well.” She looks at content and links in every audit so she can tell a client where the real problem is, even when it isn’t technical. Whether you write it up in a doc or a free SEO audit tool report, put the recommendation before the evidence.
And use AI where it helps, with your own eyes on the output. Eva built a custom GPT for her bespoke schema types and still double-checks every block it gives her. “I would rather just double check everything with my own eyes, before I basically recommend something.”
Listen to the whole conversation, including Eva on custom GPTs, Perplexity for content briefs and the Athens SEO story, on the Unscripted SEO episode page. You can find Eva on LinkedIn.