Pages that aren't indexed, and nobody noticed. Not blocked by anything dramatic — usually excluded through a stray noindex tag, a canonical pointing somewhere unintended, or crawl budget being consumed by parameter URLs and pagination that nobody needed indexed in the first place.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO services built to fix what's actually blocking you
Some sites don't rank because the content isn't good enough. Plenty of others have perfectly good content that search engines can't crawl properly, can't render, or won't prioritise because the page takes four seconds to load.
Technical SEO is the work of finding out which of those you're dealing with, and fixing it.
Why technical problems cap everything else you do in SEO
Content and links are what most SEO budgets get spent on. Both of them are throttled by the technical layer underneath.
A page that isn't indexed cannot rank, regardless of how well it's written. A site where JavaScript renders the main content after the crawler has already moved on is, from Google's perspective, largely empty. A page that fails Core Web Vitals is competing at a disadvantage against one that doesn't, on every query, permanently.
None of that shows up as a technical problem in a monthly report. It shows up as content that "isn't working" and links that "aren't moving anything" — which is why businesses often spend a year and a substantial budget solving the wrong problem.
This is the same principle that runs through everything we do: diagnose the foundation before spending on what sits on top of it. On this page, it's the whole job rather than the first step.
What's usually going wrong
Across most sites we look at, the same handful of issues account for the majority of the damage:
Content that search engines never see. JavaScript-heavy sites where the meaningful content loads after render. The page looks complete in a browser and close to empty to a crawler.
Core Web Vitals failures on mobile specifically. Sites that pass comfortably on desktop and fail on mobile, which is what actually gets assessed.
A migration or redesign that quietly lost rankings. Redirects mapped incompletely, or not at all. Traffic drops, and by the time anyone connects it to the redesign three months have passed.
Duplicate content the business doesn't know it has. Filter and sort parameters generating dozens of near-identical URLs, or the same page reachable at four different addresses with no canonical resolving them.
Structured data that's missing, or present and invalid. Which means no rich results, and increasingly, less clarity for AI systems trying to interpret what the page is about.
What we do
Crawlability and indexing
Making sure search engines can reach your pages, and are spending their time on the right ones. Crawl budget matters more the larger the site — on a 50-page site it's rarely the issue; on 50,000 pages it's frequently the main one.
What that involves: full crawl audit · robots.txt and XML sitemap configuration · canonical tag resolution · fixing indexation and coverage errors in Search Console · eliminating crawl waste from parameters, pagination and faceted navigationPerformance and Core Web Vitals
Google's Core Web Vitals are three metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. INP replaced First Input Delay in 2024 — a detail worth stating, because a fair number of agency pages and audit reports still measure against the retired metric.
What that involves: LCP, INP and CLS diagnosis and remediation · image compression and modern formats · render-blocking CSS and JavaScript · caching and CDN configuration · server response time · mobile performance specifically, since that's what gets assessedStructure and code
How the site is organised, and whether machines can parse it.
What that involves: JavaScript rendering and crawlability · structured data implementation and validation · URL structure · internal linking architecture · duplicate content resolution · heading and semantic markupSecurity and migrations
What that involves: HTTPS implementation and mixed-content resolution · security hardening and recovery from compromise · full 301 redirect mapping for migrations and redesigns · staged migration QA · post-migration monitoringOn migrations specifically: the mechanism that preserves rankings is a complete, tested redirect map built before launch, matching every existing URL to its destination. Most migrations that lose traffic lose it because that map was partial, generated automatically without review, or written after the site went live.
TOOLS WE WORK WITH
Screaming Frog · Google Search Console · PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse · GTmetrix · Ahrefs · Semrush
Nothing exotic — the value is in interpreting what they return and knowing which of the forty flagged issues actually matter for your site.How we work
A diagnosis before a proposal.
We audit before recommending anything, because the fix list is different for every site and the honest version of this service can't be scoped blind.
Prioritised, not exhaustive.
An automated crawl will flag hundreds of issues. Most don't matter. You get a ranked list — what to fix now, what to fix eventually, what to ignore — with the reasoning attached, so it's reviewable rather than something you have to take on faith.
We work with your developers, not around them.
Plenty of businesses have a capable dev team and need technical direction rather than technical delivery. In that case you get specifications precise enough to hand over and implement, plus QA once it's done. If you'd rather we implement directly, we can do that too.
You talk to the person doing the work.
No account manager relaying questions to someone you never meet.
Reporting you can actually read.
What changed, what it means, what's next.
Who this is for
Technical SEO tends to be worth the investment when:
- Rankings are flat despite genuine, consistent content work
- Traffic dropped after a redesign, migration or replatform
- The site is large — ecommerce catalogues, multi-location, heavy filtering — where crawl efficiency stops being theoretical
- The site is JavaScript-heavy, built on a framework where rendering needs verifying rather than assuming
- You have developers and need SEO direction rather than SEO delivery
It's usually not the right first spend if the site is small, technically healthy, and simply doesn't have much content yet. In that case the constraint is content, not architecture, and we'd tell you so rather than sell you an audit.
Common questions
01How much do technical SEO services cost?
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It depends heavily on the size of the site and what the audit finds — a 40-page site with a handful of fixes and a 40,000-page catalogue with crawl and rendering problems aren't comparable engagements. We quote fixed price for a standalone audit and fixed monthly for ongoing work, always after scoping rather than before.
02How does this fit with your general SEO service?
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Technical SEO is one part of the broader SEO practice — the part that determines whether everything else can work. Some engagements are technical only, usually where a business has content handled and a structural problem blocking it. More often it runs alongside content and authority work as one programme.
03What's crawl budget, and does it actually matter for my site?
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Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period. For most sites under a few thousand pages, it genuinely isn't a limiting factor and anyone telling you otherwise is inflating a problem. It starts to matter on large sites, and matters most when crawl capacity is being consumed by URLs that shouldn't be indexed at all — parameter variations, filtered views, endless pagination.
04How do you handle Core Web Vitals?
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By diagnosing which of the three metrics is actually failing and why, rather than chasing a score. LCP problems are usually server response time, render-blocking resources or unoptimised hero images. INP problems are usually JavaScript execution. CLS problems are usually images and embeds without reserved dimensions. Different causes, different fixes — a single "improve page speed" recommendation isn't actionable.
05Can you handle a site migration without losing rankings?
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Migrations carry real risk, and no one honest will promise zero impact. What reduces the risk is a complete redirect map built and tested before launch, mapping every existing URL to its destination, plus close monitoring of indexation and rankings in the weeks after. Most migrations that go badly go badly because that work happened afterwards, or partially.
06How often should technical SEO be audited?
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A full audit every six to twelve months suits most sites, with ongoing monitoring in between for indexation and Core Web Vitals. Any migration, replatform or significant redesign warrants an audit regardless of timing — before launch, not after.
07How is this different from your free audit?
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The free website audit is a broad first look across technical health, search visibility, AI visibility and conversion — enough to identify whether you have a technical problem. This is the deep version: full crawl analysis, rendering verification, prioritised fix list, and implementation. The free one tells you whether to worry. This one resolves it.
Start with a free audit
Find what's blocking the site
We'll look at your technical health, search visibility, AI visibility and conversion, and tell you what's actually holding the site back. Written findings, no obligation, yours to keep either way.