Technical SEO
Content strategy on a site Google cannot crawl properly is money spent on something nobody will read. Technical work is unglamorous, finite, and almost always where the fastest gains are.
The short answer
Technical SEO is making a site crawlable, indexable, fast and unambiguous. It covers indexing problems, real links rather than JavaScript buttons, unique titles and descriptions, canonical tags, structured data, site speed, redirects and internal linking. It is the first thing to fix because everything else — content, local, links — depends on it working.
What an audit covers
- Indexing: how many pages Google has, versus how many you have
- Crawlability: whether internal links are real anchors or JavaScript buttons
- Rendering: whether content exists in the HTML or only after JavaScript runs
- Titles, meta descriptions and canonicals — unique, present and the right length
- Heading structure, and whether each page has exactly one clear H1
- Structured data, validated rather than assumed
- Core Web Vitals on a throttled mobile connection, not office fibre
- Redirects, broken links and 404s
- Keyword cannibalisation between your own pages
- robots.txt and sitemap, including whether AI crawlers are allowed
What usually turns up
- A no-index tag left over from a staging site, blocking half the domain
- The same title tag repeated across a dozen pages
- Navigation built from buttons, so nothing beyond the home page is discoverable
- Three pages competing for one phrase and all ranking poorly
- Images at full camera resolution, costing four seconds on mobile
- A sitemap listing URLs that redirect or no longer exist
- Schema that fails validation and therefore does nothing
A job like this
A South East Queensland services business had 40 pages and 11 indexed. Nothing was wrong with the content. A robots directive carried over from a staging environment two years earlier was blocking the rest. One line removed, sitemap resubmitted, impressions tripled in six weeks.
How the work runs
01
Crawl
A full crawl plus Search Console data. Automated output is a starting point, not the report.
02
Rank by impact
A written list ordered by what will actually move, not by what the tool coloured red.
03
Fix
Usually a defined block of work with an end, rather than an open-ended retainer.
04
Verify
Re-crawl, re-validate the schema, re-measure the vitals, and confirm indexing recovered.
Questions about technical SEO
Is technical SEO a one-off or ongoing?
Mostly one-off, with a light check each quarter. Unlike content, the technical foundation stays fixed once fixed. Anyone selling it as a permanent monthly line item is padding.
Does site speed really affect rankings?
It is a ranking factor, but the bigger effect is on conversion — visitors leave slow pages. Treat speed as a business problem that also happens to help rankings.
Our site is built in JavaScript. Is that a problem?
It can be. Google renders JavaScript in a second pass that can lag days behind, and AI crawlers mostly do not render it at all. If your content only exists after JavaScript runs, that is worth addressing before anything else.
Can you work with our web developer?
Yes, and often that is the cheapest route. We produce the specification and they implement it. If they would rather we did it directly, that works too.
Related: SEO · local SEO · schema and structured data · web design
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