Rhys Turton

A few years ago, if you’d asked me how to grow a website, I’d probably have answered the same way most SEOs do:

“More content.”
More blogs. More landing pages. More keywords. More topic clusters. More everything.

And to be fair, content absolutely works, and has since the very start of the “content is king” era.
I’ve built strategies around it for years. I’ve watched a single article drag an entire domain out of obscurity like a Labrador hauling a soggy stick from a lake.

But after working on enough websites, especially larger ones, I started noticing something odd. Some sites were publishing content constantly and still moving like they were dragging a caravan uphill. Others would fix a handful of technical problems and suddenly rocket upwards across hundreds of keywords at once.

That was the moment my mindset shifted. I stopped looking at websites like libraries, full of nothing but content, and I started looking at them like the building that houses the library.
There’s no point filling the walls with renouned tomes and historical relics when the foundations are cracked, the roof leaks and the door doesn’t open unless you have a crowbar.

And that’s why I always chose a technical audit over content expansion. Fix the fundamentals and growth will come without the constant churn of new content.

The Problem With “Just Publish More”

There’s a weird comfort in content production.
You can see it. You can count it. You can stick it in a spreadsheet and tell everyone you’ve published 37 articles this quarter. It feels productive.

Technical SEO on the other hand feels invisible. You spend days fixing crawl paths, redirect chains, canonicals, bloated JavaScript, duplicate pages, rendering problems, sitemap issues, and a hundred other tiny horrors lurking in the basement.

Then someone asks what you’ve been doing all week and your answer sounds like the ramblings of a man who’s spent too long alone with Screaming Frog.

“Ah yes, well, I’ve resolved conflicting directives between parameterised URLs and the canonical structure.”

This is never met with applause, even for the rest of the marketing team. But here’s the thing: content doesn’t scale on a broken site.
Every new article inherits the same structural problems.
It’s like trying to pour more water into a bucket with holes in it. Sure, technically there’s more water involved, but you’re still ending up with wet shoes and disappointment.

But one of the biggest turning points for me was realising that improving site health doesn’t just help one keyword. It helps everything.
You’re not polishing a single page, you’re improving how search engines experience the entire site.

That changes the game.

The Numbers That Made Me Pay Attention

There’s a reason technical SEO keeps creeping back into serious growth conversations.
Technical SEO campaigns deliver an average 117% ROI, with a break-even point around six months.
That’s not small, hell, that’s huge!

And companies following comprehensive technical audit recommendations have seen average traffic growth figures of around 480%.
Again, we’re not talking about a tiny uplift, we’re talking massive website and business defining change.

Then there’s the statistic that made me laugh in the exhausted way only SEO people understand:
95.2% of websites have 3XX redirect issues.

Ninety five percent! At that point it stops being a problem and starts becoming a personality trait.

I’ve genuinely audited websites where clicking a page felt like following someone through IKEA.
Page A goes to Page B.
Page B goes to Page C.
Page C decides it lives somewhere else now, and takes you back to Page A.

Meanwhile Googlebot and LLMS are wandering around looking increasingly irritated.
And these weren’t tiny hobby sites either.
Some were publishing brilliant content every single week while their technical setup quietly strangled performance in the background like an unnoticed handbrake.

The Audit That Changed My Thinking

So can I prove this works? You bet. Dozens of times.
One project still sticks in my head though.

The brand wanted aggressive content expansion.
They had topic ideas, budgets, writers, workflows, everything. On paper it looked great. And they went steaming ahead for months.
And then they came to me. Despite all the content, despite all the time, cost, and planning, it just wasn’t moving the needle.

And simply put; it was due to the site being a mess.

• Slow pages.
• Broken internal links.
• Redirect chains everywhere.
• Index bloat.
• Pages competing against each other.
• Core Web Vitals wobbling around like a supermarket trolley with one dodgy wheel.

The easy route would have been saying yes to more content immediately. And clients usually like hearing that.
“Fantastic news, we’ll publish 100 articles.” Everyone nods. Everyone feels productive. Someone opens Asana to set up tasks.

But instead, I recommended a technical audit. Flat out changed their expectations of what I was going to say and do.
Not because content didn’t matter, it 100% does. Because I didn’t want to build a skyscraper on jelly.

There was resistance. At first the question was about if we knew what we were doing, then if we were just upselling, and then if it was even needed at all.

And sure, technical stuff can feel less exciting because you can’t screenshot it as easily, and prove you’re actually spending your time doing something useful (especially important in the work from home era).
Nobody gathers around admiring a beautifully repaired redirect structure, but once the fixes roll out, the stats back it up.
This site started climbing across existing pages almost immediately.
Pages that hadn’t been touched in months suddenly improved, new content actually started to rank, LLM visibility expanded.
Even branded search performance, a constant bastion for brands everywhere, improved.

That’s the moment it clicked for everyone involved.
Technical SEO isn’t the boring admin task sitting behind the strategy. It is the strategy.
Or at least the thing stopping your strategy from tripping over its own shoelaces.

Search Engines Are Getting Pickier

But the thing is; this matters even more now.
Search engines have become dramatically better at understanding quality, structure, speed, hierarchy, and trust.
And LLMs are similar, improving or possibly surpassing big-G by the day.

People keep talking about AI search as though it’s some separate magical universe disconnected from traditional SEO. It really isn’t.
There is no AIO, there is no GEO. Its just SEO, and it always has been.

If your website is difficult to crawl, confusingly structured, painfully slow, or full of contradictory signals, large language models aren’t going to magically ignore that and hand you citations out of sympathy.

A technically healthy site sends cleaner signals.

• It’s easier to interpret.
• Easier to trust.
• Easier to surface.

That’s one reason I’ve become slightly obsessed with site health.

Improving one article might lift one keyword.
Improving the technical quality of a website can lift the whole bloody fleet.

Content Still Matters. Just Not At First.

This is usually the point where someone thinks I’ve declared war on content. I haven’t. Good content is still massively important, and it always will be, even if AI can dish out a blog content in 10 seconds.

You still need expertise. You still need useful information. You still need pages worth ranking. And a technically perfect website with dreadful content is still dreadful.

Content just performs better when the site underneath it works properly.
It’s the difference between rowing upstream manually and suddenly realising someone has switched the engine on. Both will get there, but one is a lot faster and easier!

The Bit Nobody Likes Talking About

Technical audits are uncomfortable because they expose accumulated chaos. And every website accumulates chaos eventually.

People bolt plugins onto them like strange mechanical limbs, developers come and go, templates change, migrations happen.

Before long, the site resembles a shed full of nicely finished projects, but with tools, rubbish and mess everywhere.
And clearing this away works.

I’ve worked on websites where fixing technical debt produced bigger wins than a year of publishing activity.
Not because the content was bad, but because the site was effectively fighting itself.
And that’s the part many businesses miss.

Poor technical SEO creates friction.
And friction compounds.

You often don’t notice it day-to-day because decline rarely arrives wearing a top hat and announcing itself dramatically.
But performance gradually flattens, growth slows, pages stop indexing properly, traffic plateaus.

Everyone assumes they simply need more content, and sometimes they do. Or they blame it on the rise of AI, or the changing nature of search. I’ve seen excuses pop up every time Google launches something new, or drops a new update.

But sometimes you need a fresh start.

Why I’d Still Make The Same Choice

If I had to choose today between publishing another 10 articles onto a technically unhealthy site, or investing the same time into technical improvements and website health, I’d always pick the audit.

Fixing technical issues creates leverage.
It improves everything you do afterwards.

Your future content performs better, your existing content performs better, your crawl efficiency improves, your reporting becomes cleaner, your visibility becomes more stable.
And perhaps most importantly; you stop bleeding performance quietly in places nobody notices until traffic starts looking like a ski slope.

There’s also a psychological benefit.
Once a site is technically sound, content strategy becomes far easier.
You stop second-guessing whether poor performance comes from weak content or structural issues.

You gain clarity.
And clarity is incredibly valuable in SEO because otherwise you can spend six months chasing ghosts.
Which, admittedly, is still more enjoyable than GA4 attribution reports.

Final Thoughts

I think the industry sometimes treats technical SEO like eating vegetables:

Everyone agrees it’s important.
Very few people actually want to do it.

Content gets the excitement, and technical work gets the boring spreadsheets.
But after years working across different websites, industries, migrations, disasters, recoveries, and growth campaigns, I’ve become convinced that technical health is what allows everything else to scale properly.

Without it, content expansion can become incredibly expensive guesswork. But with it, growth becomes far more efficient.

So yes, I chose a technical audit over content expansion for growth.
Not because content stopped mattering, but because I finally realised technical SEO is what stops good content from disappearing into the void.
And frankly, there are already enough excellent articles sitting unseen on the internet.