Technical SEO

Why Technical SEO Is the Foundation

No amount of great content or link building will compensate for a technically broken website. If Googlebot cannot efficiently crawl your pages, if your Core Web Vitals score is in the red, or if duplicate content is confusing the index — your rankings will underperform, regardless of how strong your content strategy is.

Technical SEO is the process of identifying and fixing every structural and performance issue that prevents search engines from discovering, understanding, and ranking your pages. It is the foundation on which all other SEO work rests. I approach every technical audit with log file analysis, crawler data, and Google Search Console signals to build a complete, prioritised picture of your site's health.

Core Web Vitals

Google's Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — are direct ranking signals. A poor CWV score means a worse ranking, full stop. I diagnose the specific causes of slow LCP (render-blocking resources, slow server response, unoptimised images), CLS issues (unsized media, dynamic content injections), and INP problems (long JavaScript tasks, event handler delays), and work with your development team or directly in the code to fix them.

What's Included

• Full site crawl and crawl budget analysis
• Core Web Vitals diagnosis and fix recommendations (LCP, CLS, INP)
• Log file analysis to see exactly what Googlebot is crawling
• Canonical tag audit — resolving duplicate content and self-canonicalisation errors
• Structured data / schema markup implementation and validation
• XML sitemap audit and optimisation
• Robots.txt review and correction
• HTTPS, redirect chains, and mixed content resolution
• Mobile usability testing and fixes
• Indexation report — pages that shouldn't be indexed, pages that should be
• Hreflang and international SEO technical setup (where applicable)
• Page speed optimisation — image compression, caching headers, lazy loading

The Audit Process

Phase 1 — Data Collection: I run a full crawl using Screaming Frog or Sitebulb alongside Google Search Console data exports and (where available) server log files. This gives a multi-signal view of how Google actually experiences your site.

Phase 2 — Prioritised Issue Report: Issues are categorised by severity (critical / high / medium / low) and estimated impact. You receive a clear, developer-friendly report with the exact fixes needed — not a generic checklist.

Phase 3 — Implementation Support: I can implement fixes directly (for CMS-level changes) or provide precise technical specifications for your development team, with QA testing after each fix goes live.

Phase 4 — Monitoring: Post-fix, I monitor Search Console coverage reports, CWV data, and crawl stats to confirm improvements are indexed and no regressions have appeared.

Expected Outcomes

Most sites see measurable improvements in Search Console coverage, crawl efficiency, and page experience scores within 4–8 weeks of implementing technical fixes. For sites with significant technical debt, this often unlocks ranking improvements that content work alone could never achieve — because previously, Google simply wasn't able to properly crawl and evaluate those pages.