When Technical SEO Comes First
If Google cannot efficiently crawl, index, and understand your site, no amount of excellent content will rank. This makes technical SEO the prerequisite for everything else.
Sites that need to prioritise technical SEO: sites with crawl errors or indexation issues, recently migrated sites, sites with significant duplicate content, sites with Core Web Vitals failures that are in competitive markets, and any site with more than a few hundred pages where architecture matters.
When Content SEO Comes First
Technically sound sites with minimal content are like a well-maintained road to nowhere. If your technical foundations are solid but you have not built out the content that addresses what your target audience is searching for, content becomes the priority.
Sites that should prioritise content: new sites with clean technical setups, professionally built sites where the architecture is already solid, and sites that rank for some terms but have large topical coverage gaps that competitors are exploiting.
The Ongoing Balance
In practice, technical SEO and content SEO must run in parallel in a mature programme. Technical issues introduced by new content (duplicate pages, crawl budget waste from new URL patterns) need ongoing technical attention. New content needs the technical foundation to be crawled and indexed correctly.
I structure most engagements with a technical focus in months one and two, transitioning to content-forward work from month three, with technical checks built into every content publishing process.