The Pages You Publish are Worth Nothing if Google Cannot Read Them
Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines crawl, render and index a site correctly. It runs as a project rather than an ongoing cost: the problems are found, fixed and documented, and you carry on from there.
Request a quote- WordPress and Shopify
- Fixes applied or documented
- Blocked from indexingnoindex on paginated categories1,240
- Duplicate URLsfilter parameters generating copies860
- Redirect chainsthree hops to reach the destination94
- Slow on mobilelargest contentful paint above targetsite-wide
- Indexed correctlyno action needed412
Illustrative. Your crawl reports your site's findings.
Four Areas, Checked in Order
Technical problems compound. A page blocked from indexing cannot be helped by better structure, and a fast page nobody can reach is still invisible. The order matters as much as the list.
01Crawling and indexing
Can search engines reach your pages, and do they keep them?
Reaching a page and indexing it are different things. Plenty of sites are crawled thoroughly and indexed barely at all, usually because of a directive nobody remembers adding.
- Robots directives and crawl blocks
- Index coverage against Search Console
- Canonical tags and conflicts
- Duplicate and parameter URLs
- Redirect chains and loops
- XML sitemaps and what they contain
Why it comes first: every other area assumes the page is in the index. Until it is, nothing else you fix changes anything.
02Site architecture
How do your pages connect, and how deep do they sit?
Architecture decides which pages get crawled often and which get forgotten. A page buried six clicks from the homepage is treated as less important, because the site itself says so.
- Crawl depth of important pages
- Orphan pages with no internal links
- Internal linking between related pages
- Navigation and breadcrumb structure
- URL structure and hierarchy
- Pagination and faceted navigation
Why it matters: architecture is how a site states its own priorities. Search engines read that statement before they read your content.
03Core Web Vitals
How fast does the page become usable on a real phone?
Speed scores from a testing tool describe a laboratory. What counts is field data: how the page behaves for people on ordinary devices and ordinary connections.
- Largest Contentful Paint
- Interaction to Next Paint
- Cumulative Layout Shift
- Server response time
- Image formats and compression
- Render-blocking scripts and fonts
Why it matters: speed rarely wins a ranking on its own, and it loses conversions on its own every day.
04Structured data
Does the markup describe what the page actually holds?
Structured data tells search engines what a page describes rather than leaving them to infer it. On WordPress and Shopify it is usually present, often duplicated, and frequently wrong.
- Organization and site-level markup
- Product, Article and LocalBusiness types
- Breadcrumb and FAQ markup
- Duplicate blocks from plugins and themes
- Validation errors in Search Console
- Markup matching visible content
Why it matters: AI systems and search engines both lean on markup to extract facts. Wrong markup misstates your business faster than no markup at all.
A Project with an End, Not a Monthly Fee
Technical SEO is finite work. The problems exist, they get found, they get fixed and the work is done. What happens after that is your decision rather than a condition of starting.
The project
Finite, and it ends with a reportCrawl and diagnosis
The site crawled in full and checked against Search Console, so findings rest on what Google sees.
Problems ranked
Every issue across the four areas, ordered by how many pages it affects and what it blocks.
Fixes applied or documented
We apply them where you grant access, or your developer receives the exact changes to make.
Verification
Fixes re-crawled and re-checked, so the record shows what changed rather than what was intended.
A report
What was found, what was changed, what was left and why. Written so anyone can act on the remainder.
After, if you want it
Optional, and never assumedMonitoring
Regular checks that keep the fixes holding as your site changes, so a theme or plugin update does not quietly undo them.
Ongoing fixes
We keep applying what the monitoring finds rather than handing you a list each time.
A full SEO engagement
Where the technical work is the start of something larger, it becomes part of our SEO service.
Most clients continue into a full SEO engagement once the technical work is done, because a site that can finally be read is a site worth building on. Which route you take is settled after the report, not before the project starts.
Questions About Technical SEO
The answers below are the ones we give on calls, so you know where you stand before speaking to anyone.
What platforms do you work on?
WordPress and Shopify. It makes no difference who built the site ... most of the sites we work on were built by somebody else, often years earlier.
We stay on these two deliberately. Knowing where a platform creates its own problems, and how its themes and plugins behave, is most of what makes technical work fast rather than exploratory.
Do you apply the fixes on the live site?
It depends on the site. Where a staging environment exists, changes are made and checked there before anything reaches live. Where one does not, we work directly on live, starting with the changes that carry least risk.
Either way it is agreed before work starts rather than decided as we go. Some clients prefer to keep access in-house entirely, in which case their developer receives the exact changes to apply.
Is the site backed up before changes are made?
Where our access allows it, yes, a backup is taken before any change. Where access is limited to specific areas, we tell you what to back up and confirm it is done before proceeding.
The backup arrangement is settled during onboarding, so nobody is working out who holds what while a change is waiting.
What if a fix breaks something?
If we applied the change, we resolve it. That means rolling it back, finding what conflicted and reporting what happened, at no additional cost.
Where your developer applied a change from our documentation, we help diagnose what went wrong, and the fix itself sits with whoever holds access. Every change we recommend is documented with what it does and what it touches, so the cause is traceable either way.
Will this affect our rankings while the work is happening?
Technical changes can cause temporary movement, particularly when redirects, canonicals or indexing directives change. That is why the work is sequenced rather than applied all at once.
Fixes are verified after they are made, and the report records what changed and when, so any movement afterwards can be traced to a specific change rather than guessed at.
Do we need a developer on our side?
Not if you grant us access to make the changes. Where you prefer to keep access in-house, you need someone who can apply changes to the theme, plugins or template files.
The documentation is written for that person: the exact change, where it goes and what it affects, rather than a recommendation they have to interpret.
How is this different from an SEO audit?
An SEO audit covers four layers: crawling and indexing, topical coverage, competitor results pages and AI visibility. It reports problems and stops there.
Technical SEO is one of those layers, taken further. It diagnoses in more depth and includes the fixes, so the work ends with problems resolved rather than listed.
What happens after the project ends?
You receive a report covering what was found, what was changed, what was left and why. The project ends there.
Most clients continue into a full SEO engagement from that point, because a site that can finally be read is a site worth building on. Monitoring and ongoing fixes are the alternatives, and which route you take is decided after the report rather than before the project starts.
A question that is not answered here?
Tell us the site and the platform, and we will reply with a written scope and a quote.
Request a quoteSigns the problem is technical
Technical problems rarely announce themselves. They show up as content that should rank and does not, and they are usually visible in Search Console before anywhere else.
- Pages are published but not indexed. Search Console shows them as crawled or discovered, and they never appear in results.
- Traffic dropped after a redesign or migration and never came back, even though the content is the same.
- Google shows a different page than the one you optimised for a query, or shows several of your pages competing.
- Good content is not ranking while thinner pages from competitors sit above it.
- Search Console reports errors you do not understand, or enhancement reports full of invalid items.
- The site is slow on mobile and speed plugins have not changed the field data.
Tell us what the site is doing now
Send the URL, the platform and anything you already suspect is wrong. You get a written scope and a quote back, not a discovery call before anyone will tell you anything.