After working with over thirty freelance clients this year, I've noticed the same technical SEO problems keep showing up. Here's what actually matters.

Site speed kills conversions. Google's Core Web Vitals aren't just metrics—clients lose real money when pages take more than three seconds to load. I've seen bounce rates drop 40% after optimizing images and lazy-loading scripts.

Mobile usability errors are everywhere. Half the sites I audit have clickable elements too close together or text that's unreadable on phones. Google Search Console flags these, but most freelancers ignore the warnings.

Broken internal links waste crawl budget. On a 200-page site, I found 47 broken links pointing to deleted blog posts. Fix these monthly.

Missing schema markup costs visibility. Adding FAQ or HowTo schema takes ten minutes and often generates featured snippets within weeks.

HTTPS issues still exist. Mixed content warnings and redirect chains confuse search engines and users alike.

Focus on these five before chasing algorithm updates.