For complex enterprise websites, dealing with a mix of international pages, growing number of web properties and expanding divisions, technical SEO debt can accumulate quickly. Especially from legacy systems, rapid content expansion, poor redirect practices, and inconsistent governance between internal departments. If these issues go unchecked, this debt slows down crawl efficiency, dilutes the visibility of high-priority content and impacts website performance resulting in a poor user experience.
But there’s an upside: resolving technical SEO debt is one of the most high-leverage actions an enterprise can take to unlock growth. It not only improves indexation and presentation of key pages, but also allows for clean analytics data, enhances user experience, safeguards brand equity, and reduces operational friction for future site changes.
In one of our case studies, a global enterprise brand operating in multiple markets saw:
These results were achieved by eliminating over 24 million redundant URLs, fixing canonical tag issues, cleaning up dynamic parameters and improper redirects.
Reducing technical debt isn’t a one-time fix — it’s an operational commitment. But for enterprises aiming to scale their digital presence and future-proof organic visibility, it's a strategic investment with immediate and lasting impact.
Example: In one instance, over 24 million duplicate URLs were being indexed due to a multitude of internal technical issues. This explosion in URLs triggered a major “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” warning in Google Search Console — impacting crawl efficiency and indexation of critical content. A major project completed here was fixing the way dynamically generated international URLs are created.
Ignoring technical SEO debt doesn't just slow down growth—it actively drains resources and inflates operational costs. For large enterprises, the hidden expenses tied to unresolved SEO issues can be substantial. Technical debt increases time spent on maintenance tasks, reducing focus on innovation while diverting IT budgets. This could delay new product launches and important strategic initiatives.
Search engines allocate limited crawl resources to your website. When bots spend time on low-value or duplicative pages, they may skip over the high-priority content you actually want ranked.
When dozens of near-duplicate pages exist, Google struggles to determine which version to index — More often, we are seeing that Google isn’t indexing pages as quickly as they used to. Crawl logs have indicated that Google will visit a page multiple times without indexing - partly due to the technical parsing required to get to the actual page content. This issue can reduce visibility for your most valuable pages.
When dealing with index bloat, traffic may also appear distributed across URL variants, making it hard to assess what’s truly working and where optimization is needed.
Data source: Google Search Console
Reducing technical SEO debt at the enterprise level starts with visibility — not just into the issues themselves, but into their true business impact. For large websites, this means going beyond surface-level audits and building a structured, cross-functional team that transforms findings into action. Collaborating with other teams improves communication and allows us to prioritize issues between teams quickly to move on ideas right away.
A foundational technical audit is the starting point — but to be effective, it must answer three key questions:
Technical debt remediation should not rely on ad-hoc patches. It requires an operational framework aligned with agile processes and must be embedded into your businesses existing development workflows.
Example: After auditing a complex subfolder structure, our client removed over 13 million low-value URLs. This was made possible by embedding SEO into monthly dev sprint planning and defining shared ownership with engineering teams.
Eliminating technical SEO debt isn’t just about fixing issues — it’s about unlocking a long-term competitive advantage. In enterprise environments, where digital ecosystems are sprawling and cross-functional complexity is the norm, reducing SEO debt is one of the most impactful levers for growth, efficiency, and visibility.
When addressed strategically, technical SEO improvements drive tangible business outcomes:
SEO is no longer a siloed channel — it’s an infrastructure layer of your digital presence. Addressing technical SEO debt isn't just a cleanup project. It's a strategic initiative that protects your ability to compete, scale, and evolve. The longer debt lingers, the more expensive it becomes — in lost rankings, wasted resources, and missed opportunities.
For enterprise brands, dealing with complex governance, multilingual content, and cross-functional execution between marketing, product, and engineering, the message is clear: technical excellence is not optional. It’s a must.
Need help identifying & tackling SEO technical debt?
The Chartis teams specialize in strategic and effective SEO debt reduction. Contact us today to see how we can help you improve your SEO technical debt.