®Content strategies fail on sites that cannot be crawled, indexed or navigated. The fixes below are unglamorous, they rarely make it into a pitch deck, and they routinely move more revenue than the next twenty articles.
Find out what is actually indexed
Start with the gap between pages you have, pages that get crawled, and pages that are indexed. On most large sites the second number is inflated by junk — parameter duplicates, paginated stubs, filter combinations — and the third is missing pages that matter. Until that gap is understood, every other decision is guesswork.
Control faceted navigation deliberately
Filters multiply. A catalogue with five filters and a sort order can generate more crawlable URLs than it has products, and crawlers will happily spend their time there instead of on your category pages.
- Decide which facet combinations deserve to be indexable — usually the ones with real search demand
- Canonicalise the rest to the clean category URL
- Keep the crawl path shallow: important pages within a few clicks of the home page
- Do not let sort orders and view toggles create separate URLs at all
Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever you own
You control them entirely, they need no outreach, and most sites use them badly — orphaned pages, navigation that links only to the top twenty categories, and articles that end without pointing anywhere. Every important page should be reachable from somewhere relevant with descriptive anchor text, and every article should link to the commercial page it supports.
Redirects: audit them like code
- Chains resolve to a single hop — every extra hop is latency and dilution
- No redirect loops, and no soft 404s dressed up as redirects to the home page
- Redirect to the closest equivalent page; mass-redirecting to the root is a signal of neglect
- Keep the map from every migration. You will need it again.
Core Web Vitals, honestly
They are a small ranking factor and a large conversion factor, which is reason enough. The three that matter are loading (Largest Contentful Paint), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint) and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). The usual culprits are unbudgeted third-party scripts, uncompressed hero images and layout that reflows when late content arrives.
Fix field data, not lab scores. A perfect score in a synthetic test on a fast connection tells you nothing about the phone your customer is holding on a train.
Then, and only then, publish
None of this replaces content. It determines the return on it. A well-structured site turns each new page into an asset that compounds; a broken one turns the same page into a URL nobody finds, and the cost is identical either way.