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Technical SEO & audits

Technical SEO: fix what is quietly costing you rankings

You can publish brilliant content and earn great links, and still not rank — because Google cannot crawl your site properly, your pages take six seconds to load, or half your important URLs are accidentally blocked. This is the unglamorous work that makes everything else pay off.

Technical problems are invisible until you look

Nothing on your site looks broken. It loads, the pages are there, the contact form works. But Google is not a customer — it is a crawler with a budget and a set of rules, and it silently penalises things no human visitor would ever notice.

A redirect chain five hops long. A staging site left indexed. A robots.txt line blocking your CSS. Canonical tags all pointing at the homepage. Pages orphaned with no internal links. Each one is boring on its own. Together they are the reason a good site sits on page three.

Can Google find it?

Crawlability, internal linking, sitemaps, orphaned pages, crawl budget waste.

Can Google index it?

Robots directives, canonicals, noindex tags, duplicate content, parameter handling.

Is it good enough to rank?

Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, HTTPS, structured data, page experience.

What is included

What a proper technical audit covers

Not a 90-page automated export with every warning highlighted red. A prioritised list of what is actually costing you traffic, what it will take to fix, and what to ignore.

Crawl & architecture audit

A full crawl of your site the way Google sees it.

  • Full-site crawl and log file review
  • Redirect chains and loops
  • Broken internal and external links
  • Orphaned pages with no internal links
  • Click depth from the homepage
  • Internal link equity distribution

Indexation control

Making sure the right pages are in the index and the wrong ones are not.

  • Index bloat and thin page identification
  • robots.txt and meta robots review
  • Canonical tag audit
  • XML sitemap accuracy
  • Search Console coverage diagnosis
  • Parameter and faceted URL handling

Core Web Vitals & speed

Real-world field data, not just a lab score.

  • LCP, INP and CLS on mobile and desktop
  • Render-blocking resources
  • Image formats, sizing and lazy loading
  • Font loading strategy
  • Third-party script audit
  • Server response time and caching

Structured data & schema

Telling Google exactly what your pages are.

  • Organisation and LocalBusiness schema
  • Service, Product and Article markup
  • FAQ and HowTo where eligible
  • Breadcrumb markup
  • Validation and error resolution

Mobile & page experience

Google indexes the mobile version. That is the one that counts.

  • Mobile-first indexing parity checks
  • Tap target and viewport issues
  • Intrusive interstitial review
  • Accessibility issues that affect SEO

Migrations & redesigns

The highest-risk moment in any site’s life.

  • Pre-migration crawl and URL inventory
  • Complete redirect mapping
  • Staging environment QA
  • Launch-day monitoring
  • Post-launch recovery if something slips

What you actually receive

01

A prioritised action list

Every issue ranked by traffic impact against effort to fix. Critical, important, and nice-to-have — so you can start at the top and stop whenever the budget runs out.

02

Plain-English explanations

What the problem is, why it matters in terms of traffic and revenue, and what happens if you leave it. Written so you can forward it to a developer or a director.

03

Implementation, or a spec

We can do the fixes ourselves, or hand your developer a precise specification. Either way you are never left with a PDF and no idea what to do next.

Technical SEO questions

Is a technical audit a one-off or ongoing?

The deep audit is a one-off, but sites drift. New pages, plugin updates, theme changes and content additions all introduce new problems. Most clients do a full audit up front and then a lighter health check quarterly.

We already ran a free SEO tool. Is that the same thing?

No. Automated tools flag symptoms without weighting them — they will tell you about 400 missing alt tags and bury the one canonical error that is deindexing your service pages. The value is in the judgement about what matters, not the crawl itself.

Do you need access to our website?

For the audit, no — we crawl the public site and ideally get read access to Google Search Console and Analytics. For implementation, we need appropriate access or a developer contact we can brief.

Our developer says the site is fine. Who is right?

Often both. Developers build for users and browsers, which is their job. Search crawlers have different requirements, and technical SEO is a genuinely separate speciality. We are not there to criticise anyone’s work — we hand over specs and let good developers do what they do.

How much traffic can technical fixes actually recover?

It depends entirely on what is broken. If nothing serious is wrong, very little — and we will tell you that rather than invent work. If you have index bloat, blocked resources or a botched migration, it can be dramatic and fast.

We are planning a redesign. When should we involve you?

Before the wireframes are signed off, not after launch. URL structure, navigation depth, heading hierarchy and content decisions are all far cheaper to get right at the design stage than to retrofit into a finished build.

Related services

Local SEO

Rank in the map pack in your area.

eCommerce SEO

Category pages, crawl waste and speed.

Content & link building

Authority once the foundations are sound.

Find out what is technically holding your site back

The free audit includes a crawl of your site, an indexation health check and the technical issues most likely to be costing you rankings today.