Unscripted SEO · Host: Jeremy Rivera · Guest: Eva Mermingi, freelance technical SEO consultant and co-founder of Athens SEO
“Core Web Vitals won’t save you, it won’t rank if you don’t have the other basics when it comes to SEO.” That’s Eva Mermingi, a technical SEO who spent five years at agencies in the UK before going freelance back home in Greece, and it’s the line that sums up this episode. You can love the speed work and still put it behind duplication, links and indexation. Eva walks through the order she actually audits in, the fixes she pushes first because they’re cheap, and the things she lets slide on purpose, including the 404 report I’ve been grumbling about for years.
When we recorded in April 2025, Eva was about a month out from the first Athens SEO, the technical SEO and AI conference she co-founded with a fellow Greek SEO she met in the UK. They built it because Greece didn’t have one, and they were tired of flying everywhere else to find it.
The data is half the audit. Delivering it is the other half
Eva came up auditing complex sites, starting in Screaming Frog, and her first lesson wasn’t technical. It was how she talked about what she found. She’s direct by nature (“I don’t know if it’s also like a cultural thing”), and early on she assumed clients just wanted the truth, delivered straight.
“And it’s quite funny because you think that tech audits is all about data, but no, it’s actually how you deliver the data as well.”
I know that instinct. You find a thousand orphan pages and no canonicals and part of you wants to whack the client on the nose with a newspaper. The audit lands better when the findings are framed as a plan instead of a verdict, which is the same thing agencies wrestle with in how they report findings to clients month after month.
Eva’s technical SEO workhorses, in order
I asked what she reaches for first when she wants the biggest return from an audit. Her list, in the order she gave it:
- Duplication. “Usually the first things that I do check are obviously duplication.” It’s often relatively easy to solve and the payoff from implementation is high.
- Redirected links and links in general. Internal links pointing at redirects, plus orphan pages. “Anything that’s related with links as a priority for me.”
- Indexation. Whether everything that should be indexed is.
- Core Web Vitals, last, and only after keyword targeting and the basics are right.
If you want that sequence as a working document, this technical SEO audit checklist is built the same way, ending in fixes rather than a pile of warnings. Eva’s version has one rule on top: the order is a priority order, so you don’t skip to the speed scores because they’re the most fun to fix.
Core Web Vitals won’t save you
Eva is a tech SEO who loves Core Web Vitals work, which is what makes her position worth hearing. She checks the top 10 results for a keyword whenever she does competitor analysis, and in the SERPs she’s looked at, six to eight of the ten fail Core Web Vitals. Roughly half of what ranks from position one to ten isn’t passing.
“Because in my mind, you cannot have a website that doesn’t have the correct keyword targeting, but go for Core Web Vitals.”
I treat it as a tiebreaker. If a page isn’t on page one, polishing its vitals is like measuring the gaps between the tools on your workbench before you’ve started the project. The exception is when speed is bad enough to block crawling. I’ve seen big indexation gains on sites taking six to twelve seconds to load. There’s a difference between “not perfect” and “horrendous,” and the job is finding the point where it’s good enough to ignore. Erika Braeger’s episode on machine readability and page speed makes the case for when speed does move up the list.
The easiest technical fixes: canonicals, schema and the nav
Eva’s honest answer to “what’s the easiest fix” was that content changes usually ship faster than technical ones, especially at enterprise companies. Technical always takes longer. But some fixes are cheap:
- Canonicals. “Canonicals are quite easy to fix because it’s just very, very easy implementation.”
- Schema, for the same reason.
- Redirected links in the main navigation or footer. Update one link and every page on the site stops pointing at a redirect. In-content redirects are manual and slow, so she ranks the nav and footer ones higher in her audits.
Bespoke schema, starting with the homepage
Eva calls herself a huge schema nerd. Every site has a homepage, so homepage and organization schema come first, and she builds it bespoke: start from the main type, then go through schema.org for everything else that describes the brand and its offering.
“So homepage and organization schema is the first one that I would recommend because it helps in multiple ways and within the brand as well.”
After that, review schema if the site has reviews, and FAQ even though Google shows it less often, because it still passes information to Google. Her rule of thumb is to prioritize the types that earn rich results, since that’s where the client sees a benefit.
Fixing indexation starts with the cause
“I have to understand exactly what prevents indexation.” Eva’s checklist: is it duplication, is a robots.txt rule blocking Googlebot, or are the pages crawled but not indexed? She goes to Google Search Console to see the reason before recommending anything. I’d add the other direction: sometimes the problem is that too much of the site is indexed, and the focus should be on the money pages where conversions happen.
What she deprioritizes: 404s and harmless parameters
This is where we agreed hardest. My pet peeve in technical SEO is the obsession with resolving every 404 in Search Console. Eva went there before I finished the sentence.
“But I find it quite healthy for a website to have like an X amount of 404s. It’s quite healthy. It’s normal.”
Her caveats: not if it’s an important page, and not if the number is high. The same goes for a few URL parameters that aren’t causing problems. She’ll mention them in the audit. She won’t make a big fuss over them. I think of the 404 report as the recycle bin: worth a look for anything valuable that got thrown out, not a to-do list. Eva is also quoted on this in our roundup of 7 quick wins hiding in your last SEO crawl, where her view is the counterweight to the clean-every-404 camp.
Selling technical SEO without overselling it
Every campaign splits its budget between content, links and technical work, so how do you make the case for technical SEO without promising it’ll triple traffic? Eva looks at content and links in every technical audit too, so she can say where the site’s real problem is.
“So I’m not going to create issues when they’re not. I’m just going to say this where I think that you should focus.”
Her weighting changes with the site. On very large sites, technical comes slightly ahead of content, because the content already exists and the links are usually fine. On small and mid-sized sites, content strategy comes first. I’d stretch “technical” to cover structural problems too: a checkout with 13 form fields, or 50 blog posts with no call to action. If performance is measured in leads and you forgot to ask, that’s a structural problem.
AI as a means, with your own eyes on the output
“So I’ve always treated AI as a means to be better at what I do.”
Eva started her own site partly to test AI content against Google. With audit data, though, she checks everything herself before recommending it. Where AI has earned a place in her workflow:
- A custom GPT for schema. At her previous agency she fed a custom GPT the specific, named bespoke schemas she uses, so she could ask for them by name. “But always, always, always double checking.”
- Redirect maps, tried, and also always double-checked. When I tried it, ChatGPT guessed from the URL slugs and Perplexity did better because it could find the content.
- Perplexity for content briefs. “They’re brilliant with our content briefs.”
- Different models for different jobs. In her experience ChatGPT is stronger on analytical work and Claude is better with the human element.
Do this today: build a custom GPT
Her one recommendation for the afternoon after listening: “I would say custom GPTs. They’re really, cool to experiment with. And you can really tailor them to your exact specific need.” She already runs one for content on her site and planned to rebuild it around Google’s March update.
Where to find Eva Mermingi
Eva’s personal project is Oliver’s Trust, a Greek-language WordPress site about stray animals and animal welfare, and the first site she’s done SEO on in her native language. Her consulting site is evamermingi.com, her conference is Athens SEO, and she says the best way to reach her is LinkedIn.
🎧 Listen to the full episode or watch it on YouTube, and subscribe to Unscripted SEO so you catch the next one.
