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Technical SEO

Crawlability, Core Web Vitals, indexation and schema — the technical foundation Google and AI engines both need.

Overview

What we do & why it matters

Technical SEO is the foundation everything else stands on. If engines can’t crawl, render and trust your site, no amount of content will rank. We fix the plumbing — speed, crawl budget, indexation, structured data — so every page you publish can compete, on Google and inside AI answers.

What’s included

  • Full technical audit & prioritized roadmap
  • Core Web Vitals & page-speed fixes
  • Crawlability, indexation & sitemap hygiene
  • Schema / structured-data rollout
  • JavaScript rendering & log-file analysis
  • Site architecture & internal-linking

Part of our SEO engagement · from transparent pricing.

The audit

What we actually look at, in priority order

A technical audit that lists two hundred issues is a way of avoiding a decision. Most of those issues change nothing. The useful output is a short, ordered list where each item states what it costs you and what fixing it is expected to do.

Crawl and index reality

What search engines have actually fetched and kept, compared against what you believe is live. The gap between those two is where most problems hide.

Rendering

What exists in the initial HTML response versus what appears only after JavaScript. Content that depends on client-side rendering is reached inconsistently.

Duplication and parameters

Faceted URLs, tracking parameters, session identifiers and near-identical pages quietly consuming crawl budget and splitting signals.

Internal linking

Which pages have one inbound link and which have four hundred. Orphaned and near-orphaned pages are the most common cause of slow indexing.

Speed on real devices

Field data from actual visitors rather than a lab score on a fast connection. Mobile is where the problems are and where the traffic is.

Status codes and redirects

Chains, loops, soft 404s and the long tail of 301s left from three redesigns ago, each one leaking a little authority.

Each finding comes with the evidence we used, so your developers can verify it rather than take our word for it.

Indexation

Getting found, then getting kept

Most sites do not have a ranking problem so much as an indexing problem wearing a ranking problem's clothes. Pages that are not indexed cannot rank, and the reasons they are not indexed are usually mundane and fixable.

Crawl budget spent well

Large sites waste most crawling on parameters, filters and pagination. Directing that attention at pages that matter is often the single biggest win.

Pages discovered but not indexed

A quiet killer on big sites. Usually a quality or duplication signal rather than a technical block, and it needs a different fix.

Sitemaps that tell the truth

Only canonical, indexable URLs, with accurate timestamps. A sitemap full of redirects and 404s teaches a crawler to trust it less.

Canonicals that agree with everything else

Canonical tags, internal links, sitemaps and redirects all pointing the same way. Contradictions get resolved by the engine, rarely the way you wanted.

Thin and near-duplicate pages

Programmatic templates generating hundreds of pages that differ by one word. Consolidation usually beats optimisation here.

Log files when it is serious

What crawlers actually requested and received, which settles arguments that console data can only hint at.

Performance

Speed work that survives the next deploy

Performance regressions are not prevented by fixing them once. Here is the shape of work that holds.

Diagnosis from field data first — what real visitors on real devices experience — with lab testing used to reproduce rather than to grade.
The largest contentful element identified and attacked directly: it is usually a hero image, a web font or a render-blocking script, and usually one of the three dominates.
Layout stability fixed at the source — reserved space for images, embeds and injected banners — rather than patched with transition tricks.
Third-party scripts inventoried with their real cost, and a recommendation on each, including the ones nobody remembers adding.
Image and font delivery corrected: formats, sizing, preloading what matters and deferring what does not.
Budgets set and checked in the build, so a regression fails a check rather than being discovered three months later in a report.
Handover notes for your developers, because the team shipping features every week decides whether this holds.

We will also tell you when performance is not your problem. A site that loads in two seconds and does not rank has a different issue, and more speed work will not find it.

Migrations

The one project where technical SEO is not optional

Replatforms, redesigns and domain moves are where sites lose years of accumulated authority in a weekend. The failures are predictable and the same handful every time, which means they are preventable — but only if someone is responsible for preventing them before launch rather than diagnosing them after.

A complete URL inventory

Every indexed URL, not every URL in the CMS. The two differ, and the gap is exactly where traffic disappears.

Redirect mapping, one hop

Old to new, directly, with no chains. Chains leak authority and multiply with each subsequent migration.

Parity checks before launch

Titles, headings, content, markup and internal links compared page by page on staging, automatically, not by spot-checking twelve pages.

Staging that cannot be indexed

And production that can. Reversing these two is the most common and most embarrassing launch failure there is.

Monitoring from day one

Status codes, index coverage and rankings watched daily for the first weeks, because the cost of a problem compounds with every day it persists.

A rollback position

Knowing what you would revert and how, decided before launch rather than improvised during the incident.

If a migration is already live and traffic has fallen, this becomes urgent rather than careful: the causes are a short list and working through them in order of traffic explained recovers most of it quickly.

Monitoring

Catching regressions in days, not at the next audit

Nearly every serious problem we find in a repeat audit was introduced by a deploy months earlier. Continuous checks are cheaper than the traffic they save.

Index coverage watched for sudden drops in indexed pages or jumps in excluded ones, which is usually the earliest signal that something shipped wrong.
Status code monitoring across the important URL set, so a template change that starts returning soft 404s is caught the same week.
Automated checks on titles, canonicals, robots directives and structured data after each deploy, failing the build where your pipeline allows it.
Core page speed tracked from field data rather than one-off lab runs, with budgets that flag regressions rather than describing them later.
Internal link integrity, so a navigation change that orphans a section surfaces immediately instead of at the next quarterly review.
Sitemap validity checked continuously, because a sitemap drifting into redirects and 404s teaches crawlers to trust it less.
Alerts routed to whoever can actually fix them, which matters more than the monitoring itself.

This is a small recurring cost that repeatedly pays for itself the first time it catches a robots directive carried over from staging.

Honest limits

What technical work will not do

Technical SEO removes obstacles. It does not create demand, authority or a reason to prefer you, and it is routinely sold as though it does.

Make weak content rank

A perfectly crawlable page nobody wants to read stays unread. Technical work raises the ceiling; content decides where you sit under it.

Substitute for authority

In competitive categories, links and reputation decide the top positions. Flawless technique is table stakes, not an advantage.

Deliver instantly

Fixes take effect as pages are re-crawled and re-evaluated, which runs from days on small sites to months on large ones.

Stay fixed by itself

Every redesign and migration reintroduces problems. Without monitoring, you buy an audit twice.

Fix a platform that cannot be fixed

Some site builders make correct implementation impossible. We will say so plainly rather than bill for working around it forever.

Replace measurement

If analytics and conversion tracking are broken, better rankings produce numbers nobody can act on. That gets fixed first.

Questions

Technical SEO, answered.

How long does a technical SEO fix take?

The audit and quick wins land in 2–3 weeks; deeper architecture and rendering work runs over the first quarter, prioritized by revenue impact.

Does technical SEO help with AI search?

Yes — clean crawlability and structured data are exactly what AI answer engines need to retrieve and cite you, so technical SEO feeds GEO directly.

How do you prioritise what to fix first?

By expected impact against implementation cost, with both stated. Every finding carries what it is costing you now — pages not indexed, crawl budget wasted, authority leaking through redirect chains — and a rough estimate of developer effort. The output is an ordered list you can hand to a sprint, not a two-hundred-row spreadsheet. If we cannot articulate what a fix is expected to change, it does not go near the top of the list.

Can you implement the fixes, or do you just advise?

Both, depending on your setup. We can deliver specifications and code examples for your developers, work directly in the repository where we have access, or sit in your sprint process as a reviewer. On the platforms we know well we implement directly; on unfamiliar stacks we specify and review, because the team who knows the codebase ships safer changes than the team who read it last week.

Will technical SEO help with AI search?

Yes, and it is more foundational there than people assume. Assistants retrieve pages like any other crawler: if content is only available after client-side rendering, if crawlers are blocked, if pages are slow or return inconsistent responses, you are absent before the question of whether your content is good ever arises. The work overlaps heavily with conventional technical SEO, which is why we treat them as one programme rather than two retainers.

We just replatformed and traffic fell. Can you help?

Yes, and quickly is better than carefully in the first week. The usual causes are a small set: redirects missed or chained, canonicals pointing at the old structure, pages rendering only client-side on the new stack, robots rules carried over from staging, or a sitemap still listing old URLs. We work through them in order of how much traffic each explains, and the first pass usually recovers most of it. The longer it stays broken the more ground you lose, so this is work worth starting immediately.

How often should a technical audit be repeated?

A full audit annually is plenty for most sites. What matters more is continuous monitoring in between — index coverage, status codes, core page speed and structured data checked automatically so regressions surface in days. Almost every serious problem we find in a repeat audit was introduced by a deploy months earlier and could have been caught the week it shipped.

Do we need log file analysis?

Not usually, and we will not sell it as standard. It earns its cost on large sites where crawl budget genuinely constrains indexing, or when console data says something is happening and nobody can explain why. For a few hundred pages it tells you what you already knew. We propose it when the question we are trying to answer actually requires it.

Does Core Web Vitals really affect rankings?

It is a real but modest factor, and it is commonly oversold. Being genuinely slow hurts, particularly on mobile; moving from decent to excellent rarely changes positions much on its own. Where speed clearly pays is conversion, especially on paid traffic where you are buying every visit. We report it as a user-experience and revenue argument first and a ranking argument second, because that is the honest order.

Can you be involved in a replatform before it launches?

That is the only version of this work worth buying. Involved beforehand, we define the URL inventory and redirect map, run automated parity checks on staging, verify that staging is blocked and production is not, and set up monitoring for launch week. Brought in afterwards, we are diagnosing a loss that was avoidable and recovering ground that costs more to regain than it would have cost to keep. If you have a replatform scheduled, the cheapest moment to involve anyone is now.

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