Core Web Vitals Won't Save You - Eva Mermingi on Technical SEO Audits

Eva Mermingi is a freelance technical SEO consultant who spent five years at UK agencies before moving home to Greece, and the co-founder of Athens SEO, a conference for technical SEO and AI. Her take: Core Web Vitals won't save you if the basics aren't right. She walks Jeremy Rivera through the order she audits in, the cheap fixes she pushes first, and what she lets slide on purpose.

Read the full recap: Eva Mermingi on technical SEO audit priorities

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why a technical audit is half data and half how you deliver it
• Eva's workhorses, in order: duplication, redirected links and orphan pages, indexation, then Core Web Vitals
• Six to eight of the top 10 results she's checked fail Core Web Vitals, and why that makes speed a tiebreaker
• The easy fixes: canonicals, schema and redirected links in the main navigation or footer
• Bespoke homepage and organization schema, then review and FAQ
• Diagnosing indexation from the cause: duplication, robots.txt, crawled but not indexed
• Why a healthy site always has some 404s
• Selling technical SEO next to content and links without overselling it
• A custom GPT for schema, Perplexity for content briefs, and checking every output yourself

Eva is quoted on 404s in 7 quick wins hiding in your last SEO crawl. The audit order is broken out step by step in what a technical SEO fixes first, and Jeremy's own take on the 404 report is at the 404 report is not a to-do list.

If you want the case for moving speed up the list, hear Erika Braeger on machine readability and page speed.

CONNECT WITH EVA

Website: evamermingi.com - LinkedIn: Eva Mermingi - Conference: Athens SEO - Her stray-animal welfare site: Oliver's Trust

Hosted by Jeremy Rivera of SEO Arcade. Recorded April 2025.