Technical SEO report

Technical SEO report (decision page)

Who this is for (and who it is not)

This is for a boutique hotel, villa, or rental owner who’s tired of paying for “SEO work” and still seeing the same results: unstable rankings, random drops, and a website that feels like a black box. It’s for owners who want a written roadmap they can read, keep, and use to control the conversation with any provider. It’s also for businesses that already have demand but keep losing visibility because the site is messy underneath.

This is not for you if you want a promise, a magic button, or a monthly activity list that looks busy. It’s not for businesses that change agencies every few months and expect the next person to “fix Google”. If this feels uncomfortable, we are not for you.

The situation you probably recognise

You search your own brand name and a booking platform shows above you, or your Google Business Profile gets more calls than your website. You run Google Ads and the cost per booking keeps creeping up because the site doesn’t convert and the traffic is not clean. You ask “what’s wrong?” and you get vague answers like “we’re building authority” or “Google needs time”.

Most of the time, the issue isn’t one big dramatic problem. It’s ten small technical issues that stack up: duplicate pages, language confusion, slow templates, and pages that answer nothing. Individually they look harmless. Together they make Google unsure what to rank, and they make your paid traffic more expensive than it should be.

What a Technical SEO report is (in plain business terms)

A Technical SEO report is a written, prioritized roadmap of what blocks visibility on your site and what to do about it, without guessing. It tells you what’s broken, what matters, what to fix first, and what can wait. It’s not a “tool export” and it’s not a 60-page document designed to impress another SEO person.

It’s meant to be readable by an owner. You should be able to point to a line and say, “Fix this, then this, then stop.” It also gives you a stable way to judge progress, because it replaces “trust me” with specific checks.

What problem this solves in real operations

Tourism sites in Greece often grow by adding things over time: new languages, new room types, seasonal offers, blog posts, booking widgets, and a couple of plugins someone recommended. After a few seasons, the site works for humans but looks inconsistent to search engines. Google sees multiple versions of the same page, unclear location signals, and internal links that don’t support your money pages.

A technical report solves the operational problem of not knowing where the leak is. Owners usually notice the leak as wasted spend: ads that should convert but don’t, pages that never rank, and a constant fear that “something changed” when bookings dip. When the report is done correctly, you stop paying for guesses and you stop approving changes that have no measurable effect.

If you want a reference on what “technical SEO” actually covers, Google’s own documentation is blunt about it: crawling, indexing, and serving the right version of a page to the right user. That’s the boring part that makes the rest possible. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide

What changes after it’s in place

You get a clear map of how Google currently sees your site and where it gets confused. You also get a priority order that reflects business impact, not SEO fashion. That means you can protect peak-season revenue because you’re not touching risky things at the wrong time, and you’re not ignoring the quiet issues that quietly kill visibility.

You also gain control over your provider. Even if you keep the same developer or SEO person, the report gives you a shared reference that stops vague updates like “we’re working on it”. It becomes easier to say yes or no, because you can see whether a task reduces risk, increases clarity, or improves performance in a measurable way.

What it does not solve

A technical report does not create demand if nobody searches for what you offer. It doesn’t replace good photography, good pricing, or an offer that matches the market. It also doesn’t fix reputation problems, and it won’t rescue a business that depends only on one platform and has no direct-sales strategy.

It also doesn’t “do SEO” by itself. It tells you what to fix and why it matters. Implementation is separate, and sometimes it’s done by your own developer, sometimes by your current agency, and sometimes by us. But the report itself is the decision tool.

Typical findings on tourism websites (what we see again and again)

Language and region confusion (especially Greek and English)

A common setup is Greek and English pages that are not clearly separated, or they exist but Google can’t tell which is for which audience. Sometimes English pages get indexed as the main version for Greek searches, sometimes the opposite. Sometimes there are three versions: with and without www, and with a language folder, all indexable. It’s not dramatic, but it splits signals and makes rankings unstable.

This usually breaks when a theme or plugin generates language URLs inconsistently, or when hreflang is missing or wrong. If you want to understand how Google interprets language targeting, this is the reference point. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions

Duplicate pages that look different to you, but identical to Google

Tourism sites create duplicates in sneaky ways: room pages with tracking parameters, seasonal offers copied and renamed, tag pages, category pages, and search result pages that get indexed. Owners see “more pages” and assume it helps. Google sees repetition and has to choose which one to rank, so it often chooses the wrong one.

You also get duplicates from HTTP and HTTPS versions, trailing slash issues, and old staging domains that were never blocked. We’ve seen this fail many times after a redesign, when the old URLs keep living and the new ones never fully take over.

Weak internal links (money pages are isolated)

Most sites have a homepage, a few room pages, and some blog posts. But the internal linking is often random: blog posts link to other blog posts, and the booking pages sit alone. Google uses internal links to understand what you consider important. If your suites page is three clicks deep and linked only from the menu, it’s not treated like a priority.

This isn’t about “SEO tricks”. It’s about whether your site behaves like a business brochure or like a structured catalog. Internal linking is one of the simplest signals you control, and it’s often ignored because it’s nobody’s job.

For a neutral explanation of why internal links matter for crawling and importance, Ahrefs has a decent overview. https://ahrefs.com/blog/internal-links/

Missing schema basics (not fancy, just correct)

Tourism businesses often have no structured data at all, or they have broken schema from a plugin that was never checked. Basic schema won’t magically rank you, but wrong schema can create confusion, and missing basics can mean lost opportunities for clearer presentation. For hotels and accommodations, the basics are usually Organization, LocalBusiness, and clearly structured pages for rooms or units, depending on the model.

Schema is easy to talk about and easy to fake. The report doesn’t “add schema”. It checks what’s there, whether it matches the content, and whether it’s valid. For the standard definitions, this is the source. https://schema.org/

Slow templates and heavy scripts that punish mobile users

The common pattern is a beautiful theme with sliders, video headers, five tracking scripts, and a booking widget that loads late. On desktop it feels okay. On mobile, it’s slow and jumpy, and users leave. This hits SEO indirectly because engagement drops and Google sees a weaker result, but it hits revenue directly because paid clicks bounce.

We don’t care about perfect scores. We care about whether the site loads reliably on the phones your guests actually use. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is not the full truth, but it’s a good shared reference for what’s heavy and why. https://pagespeed.web.dev/

Pages that answer nothing (thin content that exists because someone said “add content”)

A page like “Halkidiki holidays” with two sentences and a stock photo is not a page. It’s a placeholder. It doesn’t answer a question, it doesn’t help a guest decide, and it doesn’t deserve to rank. Tourism sites often have many pages like this because someone pushed for “more content” without a plan.

This doesn’t mean you need long articles. It means every indexable page should do a job: explain a room, a location, a policy, a difference, a reason to choose you. If it can’t do that, it should not be indexable, or it should be improved.

Priority table (owner-readable)

You don’t need a technical degree. You need a way to decide what to touch first and what to leave alone until winter. Here’s the logic we use in the report, written the way owners think about risk and return.

Priority 1: Stops Google from indexing the wrong thing

These are the items that create confusion about which pages are “real” and which version should rank. When these are wrong, everything else is unstable, including Google Ads performance because landing pages change or split signals.

• Duplicate URLs (HTTP and HTTPS, www and non-www, trailing slash issues, parameter indexing)
• Indexing of thin or utility pages (tag pages, internal search results, filter pages)
• Canonical mistakes and pagination issues that create multiple competing versions
• Language targeting errors (hreflang missing, wrong, or inconsistent)

Priority 2: Makes important pages crawlable, understandable, and connected

These issues don’t always cause a dramatic drop, but they cap growth. You can publish and run ads all you want, but the site won’t build consistent visibility.

Typical examples are internal linking that doesn’t support room and booking pages, confusing navigation structures, and missing signals that tell Google what each page is about. This is also where you often find “orphan pages” that exist but are not properly linked, so they never get real traffic. If you’ve ever said “we have a page for that but nobody finds it”, it’s usually here.

Priority 3: Improves speed and stability for mobile users

Speed is rarely the only issue, but it’s often the reason paid traffic feels expensive. It also affects how confident you feel changing the site, because every change risks breaking something.

This includes heavy templates, uncompressed media, script overload, and layout shifts from late-loading widgets. Owners usually notice this after the first season of running ads seriously, because the cost makes the problem visible.

Priority 4: Cleans up credibility signals and presentation

This is where you make the site look consistent to search engines and users. It matters, but it comes after the basics.

Examples include missing structured data basics, inconsistent business details across the site, weak meta presentation, and pages that exist but say very little. Fixing this helps, but only after Google can reliably crawl and trust the structure.

What’s included (and what you actually receive)

You receive a written report that you can forward to a developer without translating it into tech language, plus a priority list that tells you what to do first. It’s built to stop endless back-and-forth and stop work that looks busy but changes nothing.

• Indexing and crawlability review: what Google can and cannot access, and what it should not index
• Duplicate and canonical review: where you’re splitting signals and which version should be the reference
• Language and region setup review: whether Greek and English are correctly separated and understood
• Internal linking and site structure review: whether your money pages are supported or isolated
• Template performance review: what makes mobile slow and unstable, and what parts are responsible
• Structured data basics check: validity and alignment with what the page actually says
• Content quality flags: pages that answer nothing, pages that compete with each other, pages that should be merged or de-indexed
• A simple priority plan: fix-now, fix-next, fix-later, and “do not touch during season”

How this helps even if you keep another provider

If you already have a developer or an agency, the report still pays for itself in control. It gives you a shared document that makes excuses harder. Instead of “we’re optimizing”, you can ask, “Did you fix the duplicates? Did you correct hreflang? Did you stop indexing thin pages?” It changes the relationship from trust-based to evidence-based, without turning you into a micromanager.

It also protects you from the classic trap: a provider doing visible changes because they’re easy, while ignoring the structural issues because they’re boring. SEO breaks on boring details. That’s why owners get burned.

If you want an independent framework for what “technical SEO” tasks are commonly tracked, Semrush’s technical SEO guides outline the categories clearly. You don’t need to follow their method, but the categories match reality. https://www.semrush.com/blog/technical-seo/

When this is a bad fit

This is a bad fit if your website is a temporary brochure and you rely almost entirely on repeat guests and phone calls. It’s also a bad fit if you cannot change anything on the site because the platform is locked, the developer is gone, or the booking system controls everything and you’re not willing to adjust that setup.

It’s also not the right move if you’re in the middle of a redesign and nobody can confirm what the final URLs and structure will be. In that case, a report becomes a moving target. Another bad fit is when multiple agencies have access and changes happen without ownership. We do not do optimisation if other agencies have access, because you can’t audit a moving floor.

What usually breaks if you ignore this

The first thing that breaks is confidence. You stop trusting your data because rankings move without explanation, and you don’t know whether it’s seasonality, competition, or your own site. Then you start spending more on Ads to compensate, because at least Ads feels controllable, even when it’s expensive.

The second thing that breaks is momentum. You publish content or add new pages, but they don’t rank because the site structure and indexing are already confused. So you conclude “SEO doesn’t work for us”, when the real issue is that Google can’t reliably understand what you have.

The third thing is risk during peak season. Small technical changes can cause large visibility drops when the foundations are weak. We’ve seen sites lose their main language pages from the index because a plugin update changed canonical tags. Nobody notices for weeks because bookings still come from platforms, and by the time you see it, you’ve paid for it.

What we need from you to start (so this stays practical)

To make this report useful, we don’t need a long brief. We need a clear target and access to the site as a user.

Send us your site link and the top 3 search queries you want to show for. Not 30 keywords, just three that would actually change your business if you ranked. For example: “boutique hotel thessaloniki”, “villa halkidiki private pool”, or “suites near aristotelous square”. If you’re unsure, we’ll help you pick, but we need your business intent.

The decision, in business terms

You’re deciding whether you want to keep paying for uncertain work, or you want a written reference that makes outcomes checkable. A technical SEO report is not a growth story. It’s a control document. It reduces waste, reduces risk, and makes every other marketing decision cleaner, including Ads and content.

If you want that kind of clarity, contact us with your site link and the top 3 queries you care about. We’ll tell you if this is the right next step or if something else needs to happen first, and we’ll do it without trying to sell you more than you need.

Not sure where to start? Contact our local team for friendly, personalised advice and to arrange a meeting in person.

No shortcuts. No noise. Data analysis. Use only what works.