What is technical SEO?
- Technical SEO is the work of making sure search engines can crawl, understand and index your website correctly. Where on-page SEO is about what each page says, technical SEO is about the machinery underneath: whether Google can reach your pages, read them, file them in the right order and serve them fast enough.
- Technical SEO services are what a business needs when a site has traffic problems that content alone cannot explain. The symptoms are familiar. Pages drop out of Google for no obvious reason. New content takes months to rank. Core Web Vitals scores sit in the red. None of those are content problems. They are technical problems, and they are fixable.
If the technical layer is broken, nothing else in your SEO reaches full effect. You can write strong content, earn genuine links and sharpen every headline, and still watch a capable site underperform because Google cannot crawl it cleanly or keeps hitting errors. In my experience the highest impact fix is usually the least glamorous one.
What the service covers
I work on the foundations a site needs before content and links can do their job: crawling, indexing, site speed, structured data and site architecture. The engagement starts with a technical audit, moves into fixing what the audit finds, and ends with evidence that the fix worked. Where a change needs your developer, you get exact instructions rather than a list of vague recommendations.
Who it is for
- Technical SEO is usually the right first engagement when a site fits one or more of these patterns:
- Pages that rank and then vanish, or never rank at all, while competitors with weaker content do
- A site that has grown for years and has never had a technical review
- A recent redesign, migration or platform change that coincided with a traffic drop
- An ecommerce store with thousands of URLs, filters and parameters
- A business preparing to scale content and wanting the foundation solid first
- If you are not yet sure whether your problem is technical or on-page, an SEO audit is the quicker way to find out, and it tells you which of the two you are actually buying.
If traffic fell after a redesign or a platform change rather than drifting down over time, the problem is migration shaped and it has its own playbook: website migration SEO.
Crawlability and indexation
Robots and canonicals
- The first question is whether Google can get in at all. I review your robots.txt rules to make sure they are not accidentally blocking important pages, check that your URLs return the right status codes, and verify that redirects land where they should rather than chaining through three hops.
- Canonical tags are a frequent source of quiet damage. When several URLs serve the same or near-identical content, search engines need one clear signal about which version is the original. A missing or conflicting canonical lets Google guess, and Google often guesses the page you did not want indexed. I audit every canonical so your preferred version is unmistakable, and I check the duplicates that usually cause the problem: trailing slashes, uppercase variants, tracking parameters, pagination and printer or AMP versions.
XML sitemaps and site architecture
- Your XML sitemap should be a clean map of the pages that matter, not a dumping ground for every URL on the server. I check that it is submitted, current, free of redirecting or noindexed URLs, and organised so Google reads the hierarchy correctly.
- Site architecture is the structural side of crawlability. A flat, logical structure with deliberate internal linking helps Google find deep pages and understand which pages carry the most importance. If your main service pages sit five clicks from the homepage, no amount of on-page work rescues them. Where the structure is the problem, I map the pages that matter, propose the internal links that connect them, and show you the crawl depth before and after.
Page experience and Core Web Vitals
- Page experience is a baseline expectation now. Google's Core Web Vitals measure three things: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds to interaction, and how much the layout shifts while it loads. Weak scores in any of the three frustrate real visitors and hold back rankings.
- The fixes are usually concrete. Large images get compressed, resized and served in modern formats. Render blocking code gets deferred. Slow hosting gets identified for what it is rather than blamed on the theme. Layout shift gets traced back to images without dimensions or embeds that load late. I do not stop at flagging the problem. I fix it, then re-test to prove the score moved.
Speed work is also commercial work. A page that loads in one second and a page that loads in four seconds can rank similarly and convert very differently. That gap shows up in enquiry rates long before it shows up in rankings.
Structured data and machine readability
- Structured data is the layer that helps search engines and AI systems understand what your content means. Schema markup tells Google that a page is a service, a review, an FAQ, an article or a product, and states the key facts in a form a machine can read without guessing.
- I implement the schema that fits your business: Service and Offer markup on service pages, FAQ markup where the questions genuinely help a reader, organisation and person markup that keeps your entity consistent, breadcrumb markup, and product markup for ecommerce. Done properly, structured data also makes your content easier for AI engines to extract and cite, which is increasingly part of the same visibility problem.
The common failure is not missing markup. It is markup that contradicts the page, duplicates an entity, or describes a rating nobody gave. I audit what is already output, remove what is wrong, and add only what the page can honestly support.
Technical SEO audit first: what I check
- Every engagement starts with a full technical audit. I run a crawl of your site and check:
- Crawlability: robots rules, blocked resources, orphan pages and redirect chains
- Indexation: pages that should be indexed but are not, and pages indexed that should not be
- Canonical and duplicate content signals across parameters, pagination and variants
- Site speed and Core Web Vitals on mobile and desktop
- Structured data implementation and errors
- Site architecture and internal linking depth
- HTTPS, security and mixed content issues
- JavaScript rendering where the site depends on it
- Ecommerce specifics where relevant: faceted navigation, parameter handling, thin product pages
- You get a plain English report ranked by impact. Each finding states what is wrong, why it matters, and what fixing it should achieve. You will not need a computer science degree to read it.
How I fix and verify
- The difference between an audit and a service is that I fix what I find. Some fixes I make directly through your platform, theme or tag manager. Others need your developer, and in that case you get exact instructions with the expected outcome, so the change either works or it is obviously not done yet.
- After a fix goes in, I verify it. I re-crawl the affected pages, confirm the error is gone, and check that nothing else broke in the process. The report you receive shows before and after evidence: the crawl that found the problem and the crawl that proved it fixed.
- The same discipline applies to changes your own team makes. If a developer adds a plugin, edits a template or launches a new section, I can run a check to confirm the change did not introduce a technical problem. That ongoing watch is what stops small issues compounding into a ranking slide you only notice months later.
Technical SEO is not a one-time project. Platforms update, plugins change code, content gets reorganised and sites grow. A site that was clean last year can develop crawl errors, duplicate pages or speed problems this year. That is why the most effective setup is an initial fix programme followed by periodic re-audits, rather than a single pass you hope will last forever. If you would rather self-check first, my technical SEO checklist walks through the same areas in the order I work them.
What technical SEO will not do
- Two honest limits, because they matter when you are deciding what to buy.
- Technical fixes do not always produce an instant ranking jump. What they do is remove the ceiling above your content so the rest of the work can pay off. If the content is thin or the site has no authority, fixing the technical layer will not compensate for either.
And a technical audit is not a strategy. It will not tell you which services to sell, which pages to build or which keywords to chase. It tells you whether the site is capable of ranking for them once you do.
What it costs
Technical SEO is scoped around what the audit uncovers. A one-off technical fix programme is a fixed fee agreed after the audit, and ongoing technical maintenance is a monthly retainer. You get exact numbers once I have seen your site, before any work begins, and you are never billed for work that does not need doing.
Clients I Have Worked With
Altez Building Inspections
More than 150 keywords on Google's first page, with monthly enquiries up from 9 to 135.
Dynaflow
Monthly enquiries up 520% in the first year; products now sold in 43 countries.
Eastlink Espresso
Monthly site visits up 692%, total enquiries up 83% to 354 a month.
More client results are published in the retail case study.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not Sure What Technical Issues Are Holding You Back?
If your site has traffic problems you cannot explain, or you suspect technical issues are holding your rankings back, book a free 30-minute Strategy Session. We will look at your crawl data and map the fixes that matter. No pitch deck, no obligation.
I provide SEO consultant services across Melbourne and Australia, and I work with clients remotely nationwide.
Book a free 30-minute Strategy Session
Tell me a bit about your business and we can dial in a strategy that fits.
