How to Optimise Your Site's Technical Score: A Step-by-Step Playbook
A practical, prioritized playbook for raising your technical health score — crawlability, metadata, headings, internal links, sitemap hygiene, performance and structured data.
Updated September 2026
From issue to evidence
Issues and affected URLs
Open Technical issues, choose Critical, Moderate or Low priority, search a URL or title, then choose an issue. The Affected URLs subtab shows matching pages and resources with response details. Switch back to Issues to choose the next fix.
Health that reflects impact
Priorities include robots access, 5xx responses, 404s, redirect chains, insecure links and broken scripts or stylesheets. Scores use observed impact and crawl coverage. They are technical audit indicators, not Google ranking scores.
Your sites and their history
Guests can crawl. Sign in to manage multiple websites and save their reports. Choose once, daily, weekly or monthly. Summary history tracks scores and issue counts; monthly archives preserve detailed reports when a crawl completes. Repeat schedules require the service to be running.
AI when you choose it
Open AI Connections, choose OpenAI, Gemini, Claude or an OpenAI-compatible API, enter a text model ID and API key, then Test & connect. AI Summary appears after connection. You can also copy an aggregate audit brief into any AI app without an API connection.
Measured performance
Review slow responses, large resources, compression and mixed content across HTML, images, JavaScript, CSS, PDF and other files. Use PageSpeed for browser diagnostics and available field data for Core Web Vitals.
Reports and connected metrics
Connect your own Search Console and GA4 properties to show their reporting data. Export a PDF action plan or filtered CSV. Saved reports and connections remain scoped to your account.
Technical health in Looker Studio
After a crawl is saved, open Looker Studio in the sidebar and create your read-only score and error key. Open the connector, authorise it with that key, choose one website and add a scorecard using Technical health score. Choose Site summary for the latest technical score and issue counts. Add a second source using Issue breakdown for issue names, priorities and affected-page counts. Page URLs and Google reporting metrics are not shared. Refresh the source after a new saved crawl. Replace or revoke your key from the same screen.
A technical score is a compression of hundreds of individual checks into one number. You don't optimise the number — you optimise the checks, in the order that moves the number most. Here's the playbook we use.
1. Unblock Crawl & Indexation First
Nothing else matters if crawlers can't reach or index pages. Verify robots.txt isn't blocking sections you want ranked (including AI crawlers like Googlebot, Google-Extended, ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot), confirm every important page returns a 200 and is marked indexable, and fix redirect chains. In Alpha Crawler this is the dashboard's crawled-pages breakdown plus the AI Search Visibility panel.
2. Clean Up Metadata Systematically
Handle titles and meta descriptions as a batch, not page by page:
- Export the Internal Pages report to CSV and sort by title length — rewrite everything truncated (too long) or wasted (too short)
- Filter the Duplicate Title issue and give every page in the list a unique, intent-matching title
- Fill missing meta descriptions on your highest-traffic pages first — they shape click-through rate directly
3. Enforce One Clear H1 Per Page
The H1 is your strongest on-page topical signal. Fix Missing H1 pages first, then H1 balance mismatches — multiple competing H1s usually come from templates that wrap logos or widget headings in H1 tags. One page, one H1, matching the page's search intent.
4. Repair Your Internal Link Graph
Orphan pages receive no internal authority and are rarely re-crawled. Link each one from a relevant hub page or category — or retire it deliberately. Then check important pages' inbound anchor texts in the per-URL link graph: generic anchors like 'click here' waste relevance you already own.
5. Bring the Sitemap Back in Sync
The Not in Sitemap diagnostic lists live pages your XML sitemap doesn't declare. Regenerate the sitemap, resubmit it in Search Console, and keep auto-discovery on in your crawl configuration so drift is caught on every future audit.
6. Cut Performance Dead Weight
Work the performance diagnostics in order of impact: eliminate render-blocking resources (defer or inline critical CSS/JS), investigate unused JavaScript with PageSpeed or browser coverage, split large JS payloads, and investigate long main-thread tasks. The crawl measures resource delivery; use PageSpeed or browser profiling to investigate JavaScript execution and main-thread work.
7. Validate Structured Data Last
With the foundations fixed, run the schema views: make sure key templates carry the right types (Article, BreadcrumbList, Organization, WebSite), and use the per-URL schema engine to clear every entity-level error. Valid structured data is the difference between a plain result and a rich one.
Re-crawl after each phase and watch the score move. Stuck on a specific check? Write to support@alphacrawler.org.
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