Technical SEO built around what is actually blocking the site
Content cannot rank on a page a search engine will not crawl, cannot render, or has decided is a duplicate of something else. That is usually the real problem, and it is usually fixable.
Google PageSpeed mobile score on this site
Server response time after our own caching work
Organic impressions for one client in 12 months
More content will not fix a crawling problem
A lot of SEO money is spent on content that was never going to work, because the constraint was somewhere else. Pages blocked in robots.txt. Parameters generating thousands of near duplicates. A JavaScript framework that renders nothing without execution. Canonical tags pointing at the wrong URL. A migration that quietly dropped four hundred redirects.
None of that is visible from the front end and none of it is solved by publishing more. It is solved by finding out what a search engine actually sees, which is rarely what you see.
We do this first on every engagement, because the order matters. Fixing the foundations makes everything built on top of them work harder. Doing it the other way round wastes the content budget.
The things that actually stop pages ranking
Not a 200 point checklist with everything marked amber. A prioritised list of what is costing you something, in the order it is worth fixing.
Crawling and indexing
What is being crawled, what is being indexed, and the gap between them. Robots directives, sitemaps, crawl budget waste on parameters and filters, and pages that exist but were never discovered.
Rendering
Whether your content survives without JavaScript. Framework sites frequently serve an empty shell to a crawler and nobody notices, because the browser fills it in for humans.
Core Web Vitals and speed
Largest Contentful Paint, layout shift, interaction delay, and the server response time underneath them. We rebuilt this site to score 98 on mobile and wrote our own caching layer to do it.
Site architecture
How pages link to one another, how deep the important ones sit, and whether internal linking actually passes authority to the pages that need to earn money.
Duplication and canonicals
Near identical pages competing with each other, pagination handled badly, and canonical tags that contradict the sitemap. This splits authority quietly and is very common.
Structured data
Schema that is valid, accurate and actually describes the page. Increasingly it is also how AI search understands what a business is and does.
An audit that flags three hundred issues and ranks none of them is a document, not a plan. The useful part is knowing which five things to do first.
Migrations are where most organic traffic gets lost
More organic traffic is lost to badly handled replatforming than to any algorithm update. URLs change, redirects are partial, the staging site gets indexed, and the damage only shows up a month later when the rankings have already gone.
If you are planning a new site, this work belongs at the start rather than as a recovery job afterwards. Our website redesign page covers what that involves, including how to keep the rankings you have already paid for.
What people ask about technical SEO
How is this different from a normal SEO audit?
A lot of SEO audits are content and keyword reviews with a crawl attached. This is the engineering half: what a search engine can reach, render, understand and rank, and what is currently preventing it. Both matter, but this one determines whether the other is worth paying for.
Can you fix the issues or do you just report them?
Both, and we would rather do the work. We build and maintain WordPress sites ourselves, including our own caching and performance layer, so most findings we can implement directly. Where your site is on a platform we do not touch, we hand your developers a specification precise enough to act on.
Our site scores badly on PageSpeed. How much does that matter?
Less than the tool implies and more than most people act on. Speed is a genuine ranking factor but a modest one, and chasing a perfect score has diminishing returns. It matters far more for conversion: slow pages lose enquiries at every step, which costs you money whatever the ranking does.
Do you work with developers or replace them?
Either. Plenty of our technical work is delivered as a specification for an in house team, who usually know the codebase better than we would. The important thing is that somebody owns the fixes, because an audit nobody implements is the most common outcome in this industry.
What does a technical audit cost?
It depends on the size and complexity of the site, and an ecommerce catalogue with faceted navigation is a different job from a thirty page brochure site. It is quoted before work starts. You get the findings whether or not you continue with us.
Find out what is holding the site back
Tell us the domain and what you sell. We will tell you what is holding it back and whether it is worth fixing.
