Technical SEO Services

Technical SEO for sites where the content is fine and the rankings still aren't

When good pages don't rank, something between your server and the search index is getting in the way. Technical SEO is the work of finding that thing and removing it, then proving it's gone.

Part of our SEO service We write the tickets, not just the audit Verified in Search Console after shipping

Where pages disappear

A page passes through five gates before it can rank

Every one of them loses pages. Most technical SEO problems are really one gate quietly rejecting a chunk of your site, and nobody noticing because the pages still load perfectly well in a browser.

Gate 01

Discovered

Google has to find the URL at all, through links or your sitemap. Orphan pages never get this far.

Gate 02

Crawled

It has to be reachable and allowed. Robots rules, server errors, and slow responses stop pages here.

Gate 03

Rendered

The content has to actually appear. This is where JavaScript sites lose the most and notice the least.

Gate 04

Indexed

It has to be judged worth keeping. Duplication, thin templates, and canonical conflicts get pages dropped.

Gate 05

Ranked

Only now do content and links decide anything. Everything before this is a prerequisite.

A site can look completely healthy to the people who run it and still be losing pages at gate three. The browser renders it, so nobody thinks to check whether the crawler did.

The work

Six areas, checked against your actual site

Not a checklist run for its own sake. We look at these because each one is capable of holding an entire site back on its own.

Area 01

Crawling and indexation

What Google is spending its time on, and what it's ignoring entirely.

  • Crawl of the whole site, compared against server logs where available
  • Robots rules and meta directives that block more than intended
  • Sitemaps that list URLs the site no longer serves
  • Orphan pages with no internal route to them
  • Parameter and faceted URLs consuming crawl budget

Area 02

Rendering and JavaScript

Whether the content you see is the content the crawler gets.

  • Rendered HTML compared against the raw response
  • Content, links, and metadata injected after load
  • Client-side routing that produces uncrawlable URLs
  • Framework and hydration issues on modern builds
  • Lazy loading that hides content from the crawler

Area 03

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Field data, not a lab score you can game with a caching plugin.

  • LCP, INP, and CLS from real users rather than a test run
  • What's actually causing the number, at template level
  • Render blocking scripts, fonts, and third party tags
  • Image weight, format, and dimensions
  • Server response time before anything else is blamed

Area 04

Site architecture

How depth and internal linking decide what gets treated as important.

  • Click depth from the homepage to money pages
  • Internal link distribution and where equity pools uselessly
  • Redirect chains and loops left over from old builds
  • URL structure that fights the way the site is organised
  • Pagination and filtering handled crawlably

Area 05

Duplication and canonicals

Where the site competes with itself without anyone intending it to.

  • Canonical tags that point somewhere unexpected
  • Near duplicate templates across sections
  • Trailing slash, protocol, and case variants all resolving
  • Staging or development copies left indexable
  • Hreflang setups that reference each other incorrectly

Area 06

Structured data

Markup that reflects the page rather than decorating it.

  • Schema matched to what the page actually is
  • Entity relationships tied together properly by reference
  • Markup describing content that isn't visible, removed
  • Validation across every template, not one sample page
  • Plugin generated defaults audited rather than trusted

How it runs

Find it, prove it matters, then ship it

The order matters. Plenty of technical work gets done on issues that were never costing anything, while the expensive problem sits untouched.

Step 01

Crawl and diagnose

Full crawl, rendered comparison, Search Console history, and server logs if you can get them. We work from what the site does, not what it's supposed to do.

Step 02

Rank by cost

Every issue gets sized by how many pages it affects and how much traffic those pages could carry. Small problems on important templates beat big problems on pages nobody visits.

Step 03

Write it for developers

Each fix becomes a ticket with the affected URLs, the expected behaviour, and how to test it. Your team can pick it up without a translation layer.

Step 04

Ship and verify

We recrawl after deployment and watch indexation and impressions in Search Console. A fix isn't finished when it's merged, it's finished when the data moves.

Working with your team

Most technical audits die in somebody's downloads folder

A hundred page PDF lands on a developer who has no context, no priority order, and a sprint already full. Nothing ships. Everyone blames the other side.

  • Tickets, not findings. Each issue arrives in the format your team already works in, with the URLs, the expected result, and the test.
  • Sized before you commit. We flag which fixes are configuration and which need real development time, so nothing gets promised into a sprint blindly.
  • We talk to developers directly. No relaying technical questions through a marketing contact and losing half the meaning each way.
  • Or we implement it. If you have no developer, our team ships the fixes. If you have one, they stay in control of their own codebase.
  • Nothing lands without a rollback. Redirect and canonical changes get documented so they can be reversed if something behaves unexpectedly.
Priority SEO-014

Category pages returning noindex on paginated results

Affects1,340 URLs across four templates
CauseMeta robots applied to any URL with a page parameter
ExpectedPaginated URLs indexable, self canonical, crawlable links
TestFetch page 2 of three named categories, confirm headers
EffortTemplate change, roughly half a day

Worth saying

Technical SEO removes obstacles. It doesn't create demand.

This gets oversold constantly, so here's the honest version of what it can and can't do.

A fast site with nothing to say still ranks for nothing

If there are no pages targeting what your buyers search for, perfect technical health changes nothing. The obstacle was never technical.

Core Web Vitals are a small factor, not a lever

Worth fixing because slow sites lose conversions, and because it's a tiebreaker. Anyone selling a speed fix as a ranking strategy is overstating it.

Some sites have very little to find

A small, well built site often has three real issues and forty cosmetic ones. We'll tell you that rather than inventing work to justify the engagement.

Where technical work pays off most is on large sites, stores, and anything built on JavaScript, because the losses compound across thousands of URLs. If you want to know which category you're in before committing, an SEO audit answers exactly that, or an hour of SEO consulting will get you a straight opinion. Pricing for ongoing work sits on the SEO service page.

Common questions

Questions we get about technical SEO

It depends entirely on which gate was broken. Unblocking pages that were being refused indexation can show movement within a couple of weeks, because the pages were already good enough to rank and simply weren't eligible.

Architecture and internal linking changes work more slowly, usually two to three months, because Google has to recrawl enough of the site to reassess what matters.

For diagnosis, no. A crawl plus read-only access to Search Console and analytics covers most of it. Server logs help a great deal but plenty of engagements run without them.

For implementation it depends who's shipping. If your developers do the work, we never need access. If we're implementing, we'll agree the minimum level of access needed and nothing beyond it.

An audit is a one-off diagnostic with a deliverable at the end. You get the findings and can do whatever you like with them, including nothing.

Technical SEO as a service includes the diagnosis but continues into implementation and verification. Most people who start with an audit and act on it end up wanting this instead.

Not inherently, but it moves where the risk sits. JavaScript frameworks put far more weight on the rendering gate, and problems there are invisible in a browser because your browser renders everything happily.

The usual culprits are content or links that only exist after hydration, routes that never produce a real URL, and metadata written client side. All fixable, but they need checking specifically rather than assumed fine.

Before, and it isn't close. Redirect mapping, URL decisions, and template structure are cheap to get right during a build and painful to unpick afterwards.

Migrations are also where the largest single ranking losses happen, and almost all of them are preventable with a few decisions made early.

Often yes, and that's fine. Good developers implement this work quickly once someone has identified what to change and why it matters.

The part that usually gets missed without SEO involvement is prioritisation and verification. Knowing which of thirty issues is actually costing traffic, and confirming the fix worked once it's live.

Technical SEO is part of our SEO service

It usually runs first, because content and links produce very little on a site that can't be crawled properly. Pricing and scope sit on the main SEO page.

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