SEO audit: broken journey paths

logan-lifecycle

Just finished an SEO audit on a site - the findings read like a broken user journey map. Critical issues: hreflang tags pointing to non-200 URLs, missing return tags, no self-references. It's a multilingual setup that's an absolute mess. Canonical tags conflicting with hreflang, pointing to redirects - pure logic branch failure. Redirect loops and chains creating friction that kills any flow. Orphan pages sitting in the sitemap with zero internal links. Weak internal linking: pages with only one incoming link. Hero image lazy-loaded, wrecking LCP at 3.6s. High priority: duplicate content across pages, duplicate titles and identical H1s, thin pages under 500 words, H1/title keywords nowhere in the content. External link issues too. Technical warnings: hreflang inconsistencies, Google Tag Manager placed in the wrong spot, 404 not returning proper status, missing security headers, high Total Blocking Time from JS bloat. Performance reference: mobile ₇₈, LCP 3.6s, TBT 410ms. Root causes are clear: misconfigured multilingual logic, weak site structure and linking, content duplication. Fix priority: hreflang + canonical + redirects first, then internal linking and orphan pages, then performance (hero image, JS), finally content cleanup. This isn't just a list of errors - it's a system design failure that breaks the journey at almost every node.

analyticsjunkie

This isn't a SEO audit. it's a brainless copy-paste from one of those tools that charges you £50 a month to tell you your meta description is two characters too short. groundbreaking.

Sure, some of those flagged issues might cause problems - but without actually looking at the site, who knows? Google's pretty good at ignoring dodgy canonical tags or wrong href lang stuff. there's a whole rabbit hole on why it does that (there's a blog post by Lazarinastoy that covers it).

What this "audit" doesn't tell you: is the site even indexed? Does it have helpful content? Does it rank for anything at all? A real audit gives you context - like "your site's crushing it on these keywords, here's some low-hanging fruit on page speed and internal linking." Tools just vomit up a hundred "errors" to keep you busy fixing things that don't move the needle. i'd rather have an honest chat with a human than a PDF of nonsense

jamesaso

The hreflang, canonical, and redirect mess is a classic. The redirect chains need sorting first-especially on mobile, because every extra hop kills page load time and conversion rates. Fix those, update the hreflang targets, then tackle the canonical conflicts. That hero image lazy loading is a no-brainer: 3.6s LCP is almost certainly that element. just removing the lazy load attribute from the above-the-fold hero image usually knocks a second or more off. Is this a WordPress site? the fix for the multilingual setup depends heavily on whether you're running WPML, Polylang, or something else-each handles hreflang differently

logan-lifecycle

Thanks for your help. Its on sanity.io. How can I proceed?

jamesaso

Since Sanity is a headless CMS, every fix sits in your frontend code and hosting config, not in the CMS itself. Redirect chains get sorted at the hosting layer - so pull up your vercel.json or netlify.toml and condense those chained redirects into single-hop rules. With mobile-first indexing, those chains hit mobile rankings harder, so it's worth prioritising.

Hreflang and canonical tags are generated in the frontend, so once you've cleaned up the redirects, update those references to point directly to the final canonical URLs. for the LCP issue, if you're on Next.js, slapping the priority prop on your hero <Image> component kills the lazy load behaviour instantly. What frontend framework are you running? That'll narrow down the exact implementation path for each one

zoecreative

Curious - how did you identify it as a sanity site? Couldn't spot any URL or context in the thread myself.

jamesaso

Not a dumb question at all. u/Comfortable-Virus970 mentioned it in their reply earlier in this thread, specifically saying they were using sanity.io, so I was responding to that context. If you came in partway through the chain it would have been easy to miss.