Fix what stops a site from ranking at all
The foundation layer - crawl access, indexation, speed, and schema - that has to be right before any other SEO work can compound.
Where this usually breaks down
Most technical SEO problems are invisible from the front end - a page can look complete and still be unreadable to a crawler, excluded from the index, or slow enough that Google deprioritises it before ranking is even a question. We regularly find sites that have invested heavily in content while a robots.txt misconfiguration, a broken canonical tag, or an infinite-scroll pattern quietly keeps half the site out of search results.
These problems compound with scale. A crawl budget issue that costs a 50-page site nothing can effectively hide thousands of pages on a larger catalogue or content library, and nobody notices until organic traffic plateaus for reasons the content team can't explain.
What this service actually solves
Technical SEO is the layer that makes a site eligible to rank in the first place - clean crawl paths, correct indexation, fast load times, and structured data that tells search engines and AI crawlers exactly what a page is. It's not glamorous work, but it's the work that determines whether everything built on top of it - content, links, authority - actually gets credit.
Technical SEO is the set of fixes to a site's crawlability, indexation, speed, and markup that determine whether search engines and AI systems can access, understand, and rank its pages at all.
How we run it
We start with a full crawl before touching anything, because guessing at technical issues wastes more time than finding them properly. From there we prioritise by impact - a canonical error affecting your ten highest-traffic pages gets fixed before a minor alt-text gap on a page nobody visits - and we re-crawl after each round of fixes to confirm the change actually took effect, not just that it was deployed.
Capabilities & deliverables
Crawl & Indexation
- Crawl budget analysis
- Robots.txt and sitemap review
- Orphaned page detection
- Canonical tag audits
Site Speed & Core Web Vitals
- LCP, INP, and CLS diagnostics
- Image and asset optimisation
- Render-blocking resource fixes
Structured Data & Schema
- FAQ, HowTo, Article, and Product schema
- Organisation and entity markup
- Validation against Google and AI crawler requirements
Site Architecture
- URL structure and hierarchy
- Internal linking depth
- Pagination and faceted navigation handling
Crawler Access for AI Systems
- AI bot access review (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and others)
- llms.txt and machine-readability checks
What's in scope, area by area
| Area | What we deliver |
|---|---|
| Crawl & Indexation | Full site crawl, indexation status report, fix list for excluded or misconfigured pages |
| Performance | Core Web Vitals report per template type, with prioritised remediation |
| Structured Data | Schema implementation across priority page types, validated in Search Console |
| Architecture | Internal linking and URL structure recommendations, sequenced by effort and impact |
How an engagement runs
Full Crawl & Baseline
We crawl the entire site the way a search engine would, capturing crawl errors, indexation status, and structural issues before recommending anything.
Issue Prioritisation
Findings are ranked by how much organic potential each one is actually costing, not by how many issues exist in a category.
Fix Implementation
We implement fixes directly or hand off a developer-ready spec, depending on how your team is set up.
Schema & Markup
Structured data is added for the page types that benefit most - product, article, FAQ, and organisation-level entity markup.
Re-crawl & Verification
We re-crawl after deployment to confirm fixes actually resolved, not just that code shipped.
Ongoing Monitoring
Recurring crawls flag regressions before they erode months of ranking progress.
How this compares
| With a Fixed Technical Foundation | Without One |
|---|---|
| Pages are consistently crawled and indexed | Pages silently drop out of the index with no alert |
| Content and link investment compounds | Content and link work underperforms for unclear reasons |
| Site is readable by AI crawlers and assistants | AI systems can't reliably access or parse key pages |
Technical SEO doesn't replace content or authority work - it determines whether that work is even given the chance to rank.
What this changes for the business
- Pages that were excluded from the index become eligible to rank
- Crawl budget is spent on pages that matter instead of duplicate or low-value URLs
- Structured data makes key pages easier for both search engines and AI systems to extract and cite
- Site speed improvements reduce the chance of Core Web Vitals suppressing otherwise-strong pages
Who needs this
Sites with declining organic traffic and no content changes
If nothing in the content changed but traffic dropped, the cause is usually technical.
Sites planning a migration or replatform
Technical SEO issues introduced during a migration are far cheaper to prevent than to fix afterward.
Large catalogues or content libraries
Crawl budget and indexation problems scale with page count and become harder to spot manually.
Related work
We're still building out published proof for this specific service — ask us directly and we'll walk through relevant examples.
Common questions
An audit will tell you, but a fast signal is this - if pages with genuinely good content aren't ranking or aren't even indexed, that points to technical. If pages are indexed and ranking but just not for the right terms, that's a content or intent problem.
It removes a ceiling, but it isn't a ranking strategy on its own. Technical SEO makes a page eligible to rank for what it deserves to rank for - it doesn't create authority or relevance that isn't already there.
Re-crawling and re-indexing can happen within days to a couple of weeks depending on your site's crawl frequency. The ranking impact, if the fix removed a real constraint, is usually visible within four to eight weeks.
It depends on the platform and the fix. Some changes (schema, sitemaps, robots.txt) we can implement directly. Structural changes to templates usually require your development team, and we hand off a clear spec rather than a vague recommendation.
The initial fix is a project. But sites change - new pages, new templates, platform updates - and each of those can reintroduce technical issues, so most clients keep a lighter recurring check in place rather than rediscovering problems eight months later.
Not sure if your problem is technical?
A short crawl is usually enough to tell you. We'll show you what's actually blocking your pages before recommending anything.
Talk to us →