Technical SEO: the foundation everything else stands on.
Before content ranks or an AI engine cites you, the site itself has to be crawlable, renderable, fast, and cleanly structured. Technical SEO is that foundation work: crawl and index health, rendering for JavaScript sites, Core Web Vitals, internal linking, robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, redirect and 404 cleanup, and a JSON-LD schema audit. We run it as a diagnostic that produces a written plan, then ship the fixes. We do not promise rankings, because the honest version is that this work makes rankings possible, not guaranteed.
> If it cannot be crawled or rendered,
> nothing else you do compounds.
Technical SEO decides whether the rest of SEO is even possible.
Your content can be excellent, your local presence solid, your pages written so cleanly that an AI engine would happily quote them. None of it matters if a search engine cannot crawl the page, cannot render it, or cannot place it in the structure of your site. Technical SEO is the layer underneath everything else, and most of the sites we audit are losing visibility not because the writing is weak, but because the foundations beneath it are quietly broken.
That is the counterpart to the visible work. Local SEO earns the map pack, AI search optimization earns the citation, and content earns the ranking, but all three sit on top of crawl, render, and index health. When that foundation cracks, effort spent on top of it drains away. A duplicate-heavy site wastes the crawl budget the engine gives it. A JavaScript app that renders too slowly gets indexed thin. A redirect chain buries the page that used to rank. These are not exotic problems. They are the ordinary ways a site leaks visibility, and they are fixable.
We run technical SEO as a focused engagement rather than an open-ended retainer. A two-week diagnostic looks at the whole foundation and produces a prioritized, written plan: what is broken, how much it costs you, and the order to fix it in. Then, if you want it, an implementation phase ships the fixes. And we say this plainly on every page like this one: we do not promise rankings or AI citations. We remove the obstacles. What the engines do with a clean site is up to them.
What technical SEO covers
The foundation is a handful of connected systems. These are the ones we check and fix.
- Crawlability and crawl-budget waste
- Rendering for JavaScript-heavy sites
- Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP, and CLS
- Indexation and index coverage
- Site structure and internal linking
- Robots.txt, sitemaps, and canonicals
- Redirect chains and 404 cleanup
- JSON-LD schema audit and implementation
Crawl, render, index, in that order.
A search engine has to do three things before your page can rank: find it, read it, and store it. Break any one and the page is invisible, no matter how good it is. Most technical problems are a break somewhere in this pipeline.
// find it, read it after rendering, keep it in the index
Can it be found?
We do a full-site crawl to see what the engines see, then find the waste: duplicate URLs eating crawl budget, orphaned pages nothing links to, and robots.txt or meta directives blocking pages you meant to keep. The goal is that crawlers spend their budget on the pages that matter.
Can it be read?
For JavaScript sites built in React, Vue, or Next.js, we diagnose what the crawler actually sees after rendering. If the content, links, or metadata are missing until the browser runs the code, the indexed version can be thin or empty. We confirm the important content survives the render.
Is it kept?
We check index coverage against Google Search Console: what is indexed, what is excluded, and why. Canonicals pointing the wrong way, noindex tags left on by accident, and duplicate content splitting signals all keep good pages out of the index. We reconcile what should be indexed with what is.
Core Web Vitals, measured on real users.
Core Web Vitals are the three field metrics Google uses to judge real-user experience, and they are a genuine signal, not a vanity score. The catch is that Google measures them at the 75th percentile of your actual visitors, so a fast result on your own machine proves nothing. We work against field data from the Chrome User Experience Report, the same data Google uses, so we are fixing what your visitors actually feel.
One correction we still make often: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024. If a tool or an old audit still reports FID, it is out of date, and the responsiveness work has moved on.
The usual culprits are predictable once you know where to look: a hero image or web font blocking Largest Contentful Paint, heavy third-party scripts making the page slow to respond, and layout that jumps as content loads. We find them on the highest-traffic templates first, because a fix there helps every page built on it.
The three Core Web Vitals
Each has a published "good" threshold, judged at the 75th percentile of real visits.
| Metric | Measures | Good threshold |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | Loading: when the main content appears | 2.5 seconds or less |
| INP | Responsiveness: delay after interactions | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS | Visual stability: unexpected layout shift | 0.1 or less |
The approach. We measure against real-user field data, not a lab test on a fast connection, then fix the highest-traffic templates first so one change lifts many pages. Performance work can touch templates, third-party scripts, and hosting, so we scope it honestly and sequence it after the crawl and index fixes that unblock more value sooner. For the marketing-site angle on this, see our Insights piece linked below.
The plumbing: links, directives, and clean JSON-LD.
Under the vitals and the render sits the quieter half of technical SEO: how the site is wired together and how it tells engines what is what. Internal linking spreads authority and helps crawlers understand which pages matter. Robots.txt, XML sitemaps, and canonicals are the directives that tell engines what to crawl, what to index, and which version of a page is the real one. Get these wrong and the site works against itself.
Redirect chains and stray 404s are the other steady leak. A page that used to rank, moved twice, and now resolves through three hops loses value at every step, and a broken internal link points a crawler at a dead end. We clean the chains up so links resolve in one clean step and the crawl budget is not spent on errors.
Then there is schema. A clean JSON-LD graph hands engines and AI tools the facts about your business plainly instead of hoping they infer them. We audit what you have and validate it on the rendered page rather than trusting the green checkmark a plugin shows you.
What is included
- Internal linking and site-structure review
- Robots.txt and crawl-directive audit
- XML sitemap review and cleanup
- Canonical tag audit and correction
- Redirect chain and loop cleanup
- 404 and broken internal link cleanup
- JSON-LD schema audit and implementation
- Validation on the real rendered URL
A note on rich results. Google stopped showing FAQ and HowTo rich results in ordinary search, so the visible snippet payoff for those specific types is largely gone. Structured data still matters, though: types like Organization, Breadcrumb, Product, and Article still drive rich results and knowledge panels, and a clean graph helps AI tools describe you accurately. We mark up what the content genuinely supports, not decorative schema that earns nothing.
Diagnose first, fix in priority order.
A two-week diagnostic ends in a written, prioritized plan, not a data dump. Then we ship the fixes that unblock the most value first. Audit-only works if you have a strong dev team; the full engagement carries the plan through to done.
// no retainer for its own sake, no promises we cannot keep
- Full-site crawl and diagnosisWe crawl the whole site the way an engine would, then reconcile it against Search Console: what is crawled, rendered, and indexed, and where the pipeline breaks. For JavaScript sites, we check what the crawler sees after rendering, not just the raw source.
- Prioritized written planEvery finding is ranked by impact and effort, so you see what is costing you the most and what to fix first. The plan is plain enough to hand to your own developers, and it says clearly where a fix will and will not move anything.
- Foundations and directivesWe fix the crawl and index blockers, the robots and sitemap and canonical directives, the redirect chains, and the 404s. This is the work that most often unlocks pages that were quietly excluded, and it usually ships first.
- Performance and Core Web VitalsWe work LCP, INP, and CLS against real-user field data, starting with the highest-traffic templates so one fix helps many pages. This stretch can take longer, because it touches templates, third-party scripts, and hosting.
- Schema and validationWe mark up what the content supports with clean JSON-LD, validate it on the rendered page, and monitor it in Search Console. Then we verify the whole foundation holds, and hand you documentation your team can extend.
Frequently asked questions
Related services
Technical SEO is the foundation the rest of the SEO and AI search work stands on. These are the neighboring pieces, plus the hub they all belong to.
Not sure whether your foundations are holding you back?
Send us your URL and a line about what you are trying to grow. We will run the diagnostic and send back a prioritized, written plan: what is broken in the crawl, render, index, speed, and schema, how much it is costing you, and the order to fix it in. No promise of rankings, just an honest read on the site itself.