Technical SEO Services That Fix What Is Holding You Back

On-page SEO is about the content of a page — the target keyword, the headings, the copy, the internal links and the meta title and description. Technical SEO is about the infrastructure underneath it: whether the page loads fast enough, renders correctly on mobile, returns the right status code, carries a valid canonical tag and is reachable in a sensible number of clicks from the homepage. The two are complementary rather than competing. Strong on-page work on a page search engines cannot crawl properly is wasted, and a technically perfect page with thin content still has nothing to rank for.

The recurring ones are redirect chains that waste crawl equity, duplicate pages competing for the same query, canonical tags pointing at the wrong URL, missing or invalid structured data, slow Largest Contentful Paint caused by unoptimised images, orphaned pages with no internal links, and content that only appears after JavaScript executes. On larger sites we also find crawl budget being spent on faceted navigation and parameter URLs that should never have been indexable. Individually most of these look minor. Together they are usually the reason a site plateaus despite good content.

Discrete fixes tend to move quickly. Resolving crawl errors, flattening redirect chains or correcting canonical tags can show up within two to four weeks of the affected pages being recrawled. Broader work — site speed, information architecture, internal linking, structured data across a large template — usually takes three to six months to translate into ranking movement, because search engines need to recrawl and re-evaluate the whole site rather than a handful of URLs. If a site is carrying an algorithmic penalty or a damaged backlink profile, technical fixes alone will not lift it, and we will tell you that before you spend anything.

We crawl the entire site and check indexability and robots directives, canonical tags, redirect chains and loops, HTTP status codes, XML sitemap accuracy, internal link depth and orphaned pages, Core Web Vitals against real field data rather than lab scores, mobile rendering, HTTPS and mixed content, structured data validity, JavaScript-dependent content, and duplicate or near-duplicate pages. The output is a written document listing what is wrong, where, what it costs you and what to do about it — prioritized by impact against effort, not grouped by category. You get the audit whether or not you go on to work with us.

Yes. We deliver a written technical audit of your site within 48 hours, with no obligation and no requirement to book a call first. It covers the specific issues on your site rather than generic advice, and it names the pages affected. Most agencies gate this behind a sales conversation. We would rather you saw the quality of the thinking before deciding whether to work with us, and if the audit shows your technical foundations are already sound we will say so rather than manufacture a problem.

Page experience is a ranking signal, but the larger effect is behavioral. Slow pages increase bounce rate and reduce conversions, and both feed back into how a page performs over time. Google measures speed through Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift — using field data from real visitors rather than lab tests. That distinction matters: a site can score well in Lighthouse on a developer's machine and fail Core Web Vitals for actual users on mobile connections. We work against field data.

Core Web Vitals are three field metrics. Largest Contentful Paint measures how long the main content takes to appear and should be under 2.5 seconds. Interaction to Next Paint measures responsiveness to user input and should be under 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the page moves while loading and should be under 0.1. In our experience LCP is where most sites fail, and the usual causes are unoptimised hero images, render-blocking scripts and slow server response. It is also the one most directly tied to whether a visitor stays.

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop version. If content, structured data or internal links are present on desktop but hidden or omitted on mobile, Google effectively does not see them. Mobile-first indexing means a mobile experience that is a cut-down version of the real site actively limits what can rank. Beyond indexing, most commercial traffic now arrives on mobile, so a poor mobile experience costs conversions at the same time it costs rankings.

Crawl budget is how many URLs a search engine will fetch from your site in a given period. Most sites under a few thousand pages never hit a limit and should not spend time on it. It becomes a real constraint on large eCommerce catalogs, sites with faceted navigation generating thousands of parameter URLs, or sites with large volumes of low-value pages. When budget is being wasted, the symptom is that important pages are crawled infrequently and take a long time to reflect changes. The fix is usually blocking or noindexing the low-value URLs so crawling concentrates where it matters.

First we identify why it exists — parameter URLs, print versions, pagination, HTTP and HTTPS variants, trailing-slash inconsistencies, syndicated content, or genuinely similar pages competing for one query. The remedy depends on the cause. Canonical tags consolidate signals where both URLs need to stay reachable. A 301 redirect is correct where one URL should simply cease to exist. Noindex suits pages people need but search engines do not. Where the duplication is two real pages targeting the same keyword, the answer is usually to merge them into one stronger page rather than to canonicalise around the problem.

Structured data is machine-readable markup, usually JSON-LD, that tells search engines what a page is about — that this is a product with a price, an article with an author, a business with an address, or a list of questions and answers. It is not a direct ranking factor. What it does is make a page eligible for rich results such as review stars, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs and product details, which materially increase click-through rate at the same ranking position. It also helps AI search tools cite you accurately, which is becoming a meaningful traffic source in its own right.

Google can render JavaScript, but rendering happens in a second pass that can lag the initial crawl, and other crawlers handle it far less reliably — including several AI search tools. If your primary content, internal links or structured data only exist after JavaScript executes, you are relying on a slower and less dependable process for the most important parts of the page. We test what crawlers actually see versus what a browser shows, and where there is a gap we recommend server-side rendering or static generation for the content that matters.

A redirect chain is a URL that redirects to another URL that redirects again. Each hop dilutes the signals being passed, slows the user down, and consumes crawl budget. Long chains sometimes stop being followed at all, at which point any link equity pointing at the original URL is lost. Chains accumulate quietly during site migrations and rebrands, because each change adds a hop rather than updating the original rule. The fix is to flatten every chain so each old URL points directly at its final destination in one hop.

An orphaned page is one that exists and may sit in your sitemap, but has no internal links pointing to it from anywhere on the site. Search engines use internal links both to discover pages and to judge their importance, so an orphaned page reads as something even its own site does not consider worth linking to. Orphaned pages typically rank poorly regardless of content quality. They are common after migrations and after navigation redesigns, and the fix is usually straightforward: link to them from the relevant hub, related service pages and any blog content on the topic.

For most sites, no. AMP was introduced when mobile performance was much worse across the board, and Google removed the AMP requirement for Top Stories carousels in 2021. It is not a ranking factor. In practice AMP now tends to create a second set of URLs that must be kept canonicalised to the originals, and when that is misconfigured the AMP variants get indexed as duplicates and compete with the pages they were meant to accelerate. A well-optimized responsive page achieves the same speed without the duplicate-URL overhead. If you already run AMP, the priority is making sure every AMP URL canonicalises correctly to its main version.

Continuously at a light level and thoroughly a few times a year. Crawl errors, broken links and Core Web Vitals regressions should be monitored monthly, because they appear without anyone deliberately changing anything. A full audit makes sense quarterly for large or frequently changing sites and twice a year for smaller ones. The other trigger is any significant change — a redesign, a migration, a CMS upgrade or a new template — because those are when technical problems are introduced at scale rather than one page at a time.

Sometimes, but it depends entirely on the cause. If the drop followed a migration, a redesign or a CMS change, technical problems are the most likely explanation and fixing them usually restores position. If the drop followed a core algorithm update, the issue is more often content quality or relevance. If it followed a period of aggressive link building, the cause is the backlink profile and no amount of technical work will help. Diagnosing which of these you are dealing with is the first thing we do, because spending on the wrong one is expensive and slow.

For the audit, no — we work from a public crawl plus read-only access to Google Search Console if you can provide it. For implementation we need whatever level of access matches the work: CMS access for content and metadata changes, and repository or server access for template, redirect and performance work. Many clients prefer that we deliver specifications and their own developers implement them, which works well. We are happy either way, and we will always tell you which fixes need a developer and which you can make yourself.

Yes. Those three cover most of what we see, and each has its own characteristic problems. WordPress sites usually suffer from plugin bloat, competing SEO plugins and render-blocking assets. Shopify has structural constraints around URL structure and faceted collection pages that need working around rather than fixing. Headless and JavaScript-framework builds tend to have rendering and indexation issues that do not show up in a browser. We build sites on all three, so the recommendations come with knowledge of what is actually changeable on each platform.

Monthly, in writing, against the issues identified in the original audit. We report what was fixed, what changed as a result, and what remains outstanding with its priority. We track indexation, crawl errors, Core Web Vitals field data, and rankings and impressions for the pages affected by each fix. We do not send automated dashboards without commentary — the number on its own rarely explains anything, and at the early stages of technical work the meaningful signal is usually average position rather than clicks.