Web agencies build good websites. But good design and solid development don’t automatically translate to good technical SEO. The two disciplines overlap more than most people expect, but they have different priorities, and it’s easy for SEO fundamentals to get missed when the focus is on delivering a polished, functional site.

These are the issues that come up most consistently when auditing agency-built sites.

Page Titles and Meta Descriptions That Haven’t Been Thought Through

This is still one of the most common findings. Pages launch with generic titles pulled from the CMS template, duplicate titles across multiple pages or meta descriptions left blank and auto-generated by the platform.

Every page needs a unique, descriptive title that reflects what the page is about. Meta descriptions don’t directly influence rankings but they affect click-through rates from search results, and a blank or auto-generated description that gets pulled from the first line of body copy is rarely as compelling as a properly written one.

This is a quick fix once spotted, but it’s often not spotted because it’s not visible in the browser.

Images Without Alt Text and With No Thought Given to File Size

Alt text serves two purposes: it gives search engines context about an image, and it makes the site accessible to users who rely on screen readers. Skipping it fails on both counts.

The file size issue is separate but equally common. A beautifully designed site can launch with hero images that are three or four megabytes, uncompressed and unoptimised. This directly affects page load speed, which is a ranking factor, and it has a disproportionate impact on mobile users.

Both issues are easy to overlook during a visual QA process, which is precisely why they need a technical check in addition to a design review.

No Schema Markup

Structured data tells search engines what a page is about in a consistent, machine-readable format. A local business site without LocalBusiness schema, a blog without Article schema or a services site without the relevant service markup is missing context that can make a difference both in traditional results and in how AI-generated search responses use the content.

Schema is rarely included by default in themes or page builders, so unless someone has specifically added it, it’s usually absent. An audit will confirm what’s present and what’s missing.

Redirect Chains and Broken Links Left Over From Migration

When a site is rebuilt or migrated, redirects are often set up quickly under deadline pressure. This can result in chains, where one URL redirects to another, which redirects to another, before the user (and the search engine) reaches the destination. Each hop in the chain adds latency and dilutes the value passed through the redirect.

Broken internal links are also common post-migration. Old URLs referenced in content don’t always get updated when page slugs change, leading to 404 errors on pages that were previously working.

A crawl of the site after launch catches these issues before they start affecting rankings and user experience.

Bloated Themes and Unoptimised Plugins

Premium WordPress themes and page builders can add significant amounts of code to a page, much of it for functionality that the site doesn’t actually use. This inflates page weight and slows load times, which feeds directly into Core Web Vitals scores and, ultimately, search performance.

The same applies to plugins. A site that has accumulated plugins over time often loads scripts and stylesheets on pages where those assets aren’t needed. A performance audit will identify what’s loading unnecessarily and where savings can be made.

Robots.txt and Sitemap Issues

Misconfigured robots.txt files can accidentally block search engines from crawling important pages. Staging environments sometimes have crawling blocked by default, and if those settings carry over to the live site, the consequences can be significant and slow to notice.

An XML sitemap should list the pages you want indexed and be submitted to Google Search Console. If it’s missing, outdated or includes pages that shouldn’t be indexed (such as utility pages or duplicate content), it’s not doing the job it should.

Poor Internal Linking

Internal links distribute authority around the site and help search engines understand which pages are most important. Sites that are built as a collection of mostly unlinked pages, with no thought given to how content connects, miss a straightforward opportunity to support the pages that matter most.

This is especially relevant for service pages. If a blog post references a service but doesn’t link to it, or if a key service page is only reachable from the main navigation, the internal linking structure isn’t working as well as it could be.

Running a Technical SEO Audit

Most of the issues above won’t be visible in the browser and won’t appear in standard client feedback. They require a structured technical audit using crawl tools and direct inspection of what’s happening under the surface.

For agencies that don’t have that capability in-house, bringing in a specialist is a reasonable step, both for your own sites and for clients who are asking why their site isn’t performing as well as expected.