How to Optimise Your Site's Technical Score: A Step-by-Step Playbook

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 XLSX 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), remove unused JavaScript flagged across the site, split large JS payloads, and investigate long main-thread tasks. The per-URL asset execution timeline shows exactly which phase — DOM, JS runtime, CSS, or fetching — is eating your milliseconds.

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.