Technical SEO
Technical SEO is everything that decides whether a search engine can find your pages, read them, understand them and trust them enough to rank them. It is the most common reason a site with decent content is nowhere. Visitors never see any of it, which is exactly why it stays broken for years.
A £1,000 deposit, then 11 monthly payments, or £5,500 for the year. That buys up to five target keywords, a named consultant, and a monthly roadmap you can read in ten minutes.
See all three packagesWhere this fits in your campaign
Technical problems are binary in a way content problems are not. A page blocked in robots.txt does not rank badly. It does not rank at all. That makes technical work the best-value starting point on almost any site that has been through more than one agency: a handful of fixes can bring back pages that were never in the running, before you spend a penny on content.
Fixes are permanent
Content needs refreshing and links need earning. A correctly set canonical tag keeps working for as long as the page exists. Technical work compounds and does not decay, which makes it the cheapest traffic you will ever buy.
It is where inherited damage lives
Sites that have been through two or three agencies collect contradictory instructions: stray noindex tags, orphaned pages, three versions of the same URL. Nobody removes the last agency’s work, so it keeps costing you until someone does.
What a search engine crawler actually is
A crawler, also called a spider or a bot, is a program that follows links around the web, fetching pages and passing them back to be processed. Google’s is Googlebot; Bing’s is Bingbot. Without them nothing would appear in search results at all.
Search works in three stages, and mixing them up is the single most common misunderstanding in SEO:
- 01
Crawling
The bot finds a URL (from a link, a sitemap, or a previous visit) and fetches it. If it cannot reach the page, nothing else happens, whatever the page says.
- 02
Indexing
The fetched page is analysed, rendered and stored in the index. A page can be crawled and still not indexed, usually because it is thin, duplicated, or has been told not to be.
- 03
Ranking
When someone searches, the index is queried and results are ordered. Only indexed pages can rank, so the first two stages have to work before the rest of SEO matters at all.
What a crawler-based search engine is, and why it matters to you
A crawler-based search engine builds its index automatically by following links, rather than from a directory edited by people. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex all work this way. The old alternative (hand-curated directories like the original Yahoo! and DMOZ) is effectively extinct.
The practical result is that your site is found by being linked to. A brand new site with no inbound links has no front door. That is why submitting a sitemap in Search Console and getting two or three real links from a supplier, a trade body or a local directory does more in week one than any amount of on-page tinkering.
The same rule now applies to AI assistants. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity run retrieval crawlers that fetch pages live to answer questions. If they cannot read your site, you are not a candidate for the answer, which is a separate discipline we cover here.
The technical problems we find most often
In rough order of how often they turn out to be the real reason a site is invisible:
- 01
The site is telling Google to go away
WordPress’s "Discourage search engines" box, left ticked after launch. A
Disallow: /in robots.txt. A straynoindextag left over from staging. We have found all three live on trading businesses, each costing months of traffic for a one-minute fix. - 02
Several versions of the same site
http and https, www and non-www, all resolving separately instead of redirecting to one. Google sees several sites, splits the signals between them, and ranks none of them properly.
- 03
Pages with no reason to exist
The previous version of this website had 288 service pages generated in one day: one template with the trade and town swapped. Between them they produced twelve clicks, and Google’s helpful-content systems treat that pattern as a site-level signal, so it drags the good pages down too.
- 04
Titles that target nothing
Not strictly technical, but it turns up in the same audit. A site with pages titled Home, About, Services and Contact is competing for nothing at all.
- 05
Weight
Uncompressed images straight off a camera, a page builder loading forty stylesheets, an autoplay video in the header. More than half of local searches happen on a phone, often on a poor connection, and every one of those costs you visitors who leave before the page appears.
- 06
No structured data
Schema is how you hand a machine the facts instead of hoping it works them out. It is cheap, it is permanent, and it is skipped constantly.
Core Web Vitals, in plain terms
Three measurements of how a page feels to use. They are a real ranking factor, though a modest one: a fast page will not beat a better answer, but a slow page loses visitors before ranking even comes into it.
- 01
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
: the time until the biggest thing on screen appears. Under 2.5 seconds. Usually the hero image, and usually fixed by serving it at the right size in a modern format.
- 02
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
: how quickly the page responds when someone taps something. Under 200ms. Nearly always a JavaScript problem.
- 03
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
: how much the page jumps about while loading. Under 0.1. Almost always images or ads without dimensions reserved.
Migrations: the most expensive hour in SEO
More rankings are lost to badly handled replatforms than to any penalty. The pattern never changes: a new site launches, URLs change, redirects get added afterwards from a list someone compiled by hand, and six weeks later traffic is down forty per cent with no obvious cause.
The fix is sequencing, not skill. Every destination is decided before a template is written, so the build has one authoritative routing table. Every URL a search engine already knows about has to resolve to a 200 or a deliberate 301: no exceptions, no "we will catch those later".
This site is the worked example. It was rebuilt off a four-year-old WordPress install: 288 service pages, 174 existing redirect rules, and 312 URLs that Search Console still had on record. The redirect map was frozen first and is checked on every build. Right now 22 of those resolve to a 200, 290 to a deliberate 301, and none to a 404.
What a technical audit gets you
A crawl of every page, checked against what Search Console reports, with the findings ordered by what is actually costing you traffic rather than by what scores badly in a tool. Automated audits produce two hundred issues, of which six matter. The work is knowing which six.
You get the problems, the fix for each, and an honest note on which ones are worth the developer time. Where we run the campaign, the fixes are the first month’s work. Technical problems are the cheapest wins available, and there is no point writing content for a site that cannot be crawled.
Campaigns start at £497 a month plus VAT, and an initial audit with corrections is included in every package. If nothing is showing up at all, try the nine-point diagnostic first. A third of the time the fix is free and takes four minutes.
Four steps, then round again
SEO never finishes. The work runs on a loop, and you see the report every time round, good month or bad.
- Step 1Keyword research
We start with the terms that show buying intent, not the ones with the biggest numbers. Alongside those, lower-competition terms that rank sooner and bring early results.
- Step 2Competitor analysis
Then we look at who outranks you and why. Once we know what they are doing, we know what it takes to beat it.
- Step 3Implementation
The team does the work: on-page fixes, new content, links and local signals. Every item is listed in your monthly report, not buried in a dashboard.
- Step 4Reporting & revision
Each month you see what was done and what it moved. When something is not working, we change it rather than wait for it to come good.
Three packages. Prices included.
Pick the one that matches where your customers are. Pay for the year, or a deposit and eleven monthly payments. Either way, the number on this page is the number on the invoice.
- Up to 5 keywords per campaign
- Up to 5 URLs included
- GMB post every 14 days
- 1+ new landing page or article
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 10 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 7 days
- 2+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 20 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 4 days
- 5+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
Every package includes keyword analysis, heading tags and meta description optimisation, image alt tag analysis, duplicate content checks, sitemap creation, mobile responsiveness reporting, citations, load time testing and search engine reports. All prices are subject to change. Budgeting for the website too? Here iswhat a website should actually cost.
Need something fixed this week?
Unexpected deadline, site down, or let down by another agency? Call and we will tell you straight away whether we can help.
Straight answers to the usual questions
What is a crawler in SEO?
A crawler is a program that follows links around the web, fetching pages so a search engine can index them. Google’s is called Googlebot. It finds your pages from links, from your sitemap, and from having visited before. If it cannot reach a page, that page cannot be indexed and cannot rank. Everything else in SEO assumes the crawler got there first.
What is a crawler-based search engine?
A crawler-based search engine builds its index automatically by sending crawlers out to follow links, rather than relying on human editors. Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex all work this way. The alternative (hand-curated directories such as the original Yahoo! or DMOZ) has all but disappeared. In practice it means your site is found by being linked to, which is why a brand new site with no inbound links stays invisible.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the work that makes a site findable, readable and trustworthy to a search engine: crawling and indexing, site architecture, page speed, structured data, canonical tags, redirects and migrations. Visitors never see it, which is why it stays broken for years, and it is usually the best place to start on a site that has been through more than one agency.
How do I know if I have a technical SEO problem?
Search "site:yourdomain.co.uk" in Google. If far fewer pages come back than your site has, or none at all, you have an indexing problem rather than a ranking one, and the two need completely different fixes. After that, open Search Console’s Pages report to see what has been excluded and why. Those two checks take five minutes and catch most of it.
Do Core Web Vitals really affect rankings?
Yes, but modestly. They are a real ranking signal and they act as a tiebreaker between pages of similar relevance, but a fast page will not outrank a materially better answer. The stronger case is commercial rather than algorithmic: a page that takes six seconds on a phone loses a large share of its visitors before ranking matters at all.
Can you help with a website migration or replatform?
Yes, and the cheapest hour anyone spends on SEO is the one before a migration rather than the three months after. The work that matters is deciding every URL destination before the build starts, so there is one authoritative redirect map, and checking that every URL a search engine already knows resolves to a 200 or a deliberate 301. We rebuilt this site off a 288-page WordPress install exactly that way.
The other services we run
- SEO ConsultantIndependent SEO audits · Strategy and roadmaps · Second opinions on your current agency
- Local SEO ServicesGoogle Business Profile, completed properly · Map pack rankings · Citation building and clean-up
- National SEOBusinesses selling UK-wide · B2B and professional services · Manufacturers and wholesalers
- Link Audits & Link BuildingBacklink audits and risk reviews · Disavow files, done carefully · Recovering from bought links
- Digital PRData and survey campaigns · Expert comment and reactive PR · Founder and spokesperson profiles
- Content MarketingBuying guides and comparisons · Service and landing page copy · Blog and editorial programmes
Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.