The best content in the world will not rank if Google cannot read it
Crawling, indexing, rendering and speed. The work nobody notices when it is right and nothing else works without. Fixed properly, once, so it stays fixed.
Technical SEO services covering crawling, indexing, rendering and speed. The work nobody notices when it is right and nothing else works without. Fixed properly, once, so it stays fixed.
Four things have to work before ranking is even possible
Most SEO advice starts at content. Content is the last step of four, and if any of the earlier three fail, the content is invisible no matter how good it is.
- 1 · Google has to find the pageThrough a link, a sitemap, or a redirect from somewhere it already knows. A page nothing points at may as well not exist — we see orphaned pages on most sites we audit.
- 2 · Google has to be allowed to crawl itRobots directives, meta robots tags, and accidental blocks. It is surprisingly common for a site to be telling Google not to look at pages the owner very much wants ranked.
- 3 · Google has to render itContent loaded by JavaScript after the page arrives is not always seen. If your key text only appears once a script has run, it may not be indexed at all.
- 4 · Google has to decide it is the canonical versionDuplicate or near-duplicate pages compete with each other. Google picks one and often it is not the one you wanted.
The work itself
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift and Interaction to Next Paint — the three Google actually measures now. Usually the fix is images, render-blocking resources and too many plugins doing too little.
Indexing and crawlability
Pages Google cannot reach, pages it is told to ignore, and crawl budget spent on URLs that should never have existed — faceted search, pagination tails, parameter duplicates.
Redirects and broken links
404s, redirect chains, redirect loops, and internal links pointing at redirects. Every extra hop loses a little signal, and chains are almost always accidental.
Canonicals and duplication
Two pages competing for the same query is one of the most common problems we find, and one of the least visible. Google picks a winner and it is rarely the page you would have chosen.
Structured data
LocalBusiness, Service, Product, FAQPage and Breadcrumb schema, validated before it goes live. Check your titles and descriptions with our free checker.
Sitemaps and robots
Sitemaps listing the pages you want crawled and nothing else. Robots directives that block what should be blocked and nothing more.
Mobile
Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. If they differ in content or speed, the mobile version is the one that counts.
Migrations
Changing URLs, platforms or domains without losing what you have built. The redirect map has to be right first time — there is no gradual rollout to catch mistakes.
Technical SEO is not usually the thing holding you back
On most small business sites, the technical foundations are adequate. Not perfect, but adequate — and the real constraint is that nobody has written the pages people are searching for, or nobody has linked to the site.
An agency that leads with technical work on every engagement is selling what it can produce a report about, not what you need. The audit exists to tell you which situation you are in.
What the engagement looks like
- 1 · AuditA full review of crawling, indexing, rendering, speed and structure. You get the findings whether or not you go further.
- 2 · Prioritised listWhat is actually costing you, in order, with an estimate of effort against impact. Plenty of technical issues are real and not worth fixing.
- 3 · The fixesWe apply them, or brief your developer clearly enough that they can. Either works.
- 4 · ValidationRe-testing Core Web Vitals, indexing and coverage afterwards, so there is evidence rather than an assertion.
One-off technical work is charged from £35 an hour. Ongoing technical monitoring is included in every support plan from £199 a month.
Before you pay anyone for this
You can diagnose a good deal of it without us, free, in about ten minutes.
- SEO Health Score CheckerScores a page across fifteen-plus technical checks, including canonicals, robots and structured data.
- Broken Link CheckerCrawls the site for dead links and the crawl budget they waste.
- Competitor ComparisonYour technical setup next to whoever is outranking you — including HTML size and schema coverage.
Google Search Console’s Pages report is also free and shows exactly which of your URLs it has crawled and refused to index. That report alone answers most of the questions people pay agencies to answer.
Find out whether this is your problem
The free audit covers the technical side alongside content and local signals, and tells you which is actually costing you. If technical is not the issue, we will say so.