What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the work that makes your website easy for search engines to crawl, index, understand, and trust. If content and links are what you say to Google, technical SEO is whether Google can hear you at all. It covers the foundations, site architecture, crawlability, indexing, speed, mobile experience, security, and structured data, that everything else sits on top of.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth most site owners don’t realise: you can have the best content in your industry and still be invisible because a robots directive is blocking it, your pages load too slowly, or Google is wasting its crawl budget on thousands of junk URLs. As a technical SEO consultant, my job is to remove those hidden ceilings so your real strengths can actually show through in the rankings.
Who needs technical SEO?
Almost every site has issues, but it becomes urgent for these.
Larger sites and storesHundreds or thousands of pages, where crawl budget and duplicate URLs stop being theoretical and start deciding what gets indexed at all.
Sites that should rank but do notGood content, decent links, and still stuck. When that combination holds, the cause is almost always technical rather than editorial.
After a redesign or migrationWhere broken redirects and lost URLs quietly wipe out rankings that took years to earn, usually without anybody noticing for a quarter.
Slow websitesFailing Core Web Vitals and losing both rankings and conversions to load times, on templates rather than on individual pages.
Anyone investing in content or linksWho wants to be sure that investment is not leaking away through faults nobody has looked for yet.
Not sure which describes you?That is exactly what an SEO technical audit is for, and it is the cheapest way to find out before committing a budget.
How technical SEO gets you ranked
Five layers, worked in the order that gives the fastest safe return.
01
Crawlability and architectureSearch engines discover pages by following links. If your architecture is a maze of orphaned pages, redirect chains and accidental internal linking, important pages get missed or buried too deep to matter. I map how your site is actually crawled rather than how the sitemap claims it is, flatten unnecessary depth, fix chains and loops, and get your most valuable pages within a click or two of the homepage.
02
Indexing controlNot every page should be in the index, and the ones that should must not be accidentally blocked. I audit robots.txt, meta robots tags, canonicals and XML sitemaps so exactly the pages you want ranking are indexed, and the thin, duplicate and utility pages that dilute your quality signals are not.
03
Crawl budget and duplicate URLsOn bigger sites only so many pages get crawled per visit. Faceted navigation, filters, session IDs and pagination can generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs that soak up that budget and confuse the index. I bring these under control with canonicalisation, parameter handling and deliberate internal linking, so crawling is spent on the pages that earn money.
04
Site speed and Core Web VitalsSpeed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor at the same time. I diagnose what is actually slowing your pages, oversized images, render-blocking scripts, bloated code, slow response times, and fix what genuinely moves LCP, INP and CLS rather than what moves a synthetic score.
05
Mobile, security and structured dataThe mobile version of your site is the one that gets indexed, so it has to be genuinely solid rather than an afterthought. I confirm HTTPS is correctly implemented and add structured data so your pages become eligible for rich results, review stars, FAQs and breadcrumbs. That markup increasingly helps answer engines understand and cite you too, which the AEO and GEO page covers.
Every step has to work, or you don’t rank
Foundations before flourishes. I would rather fix the indexing bug hiding half your site than tune a meta description, and I will always explain why a given fix is worth doing before it gets done.
How technical SEO benefits your business
Mostly by removing ceilings rather than adding anything.
Existing content finally ranksRemoving a technical ceiling often lifts pages you already published, with no new content required and no extra spend.
A faster, smoother siteThe same fixes that satisfy a crawler satisfy a visitor on a phone, so conversion rate usually moves alongside rankings.
More of your site indexedFix crawl and indexing faults and search engines can finally see the pages they had been quietly skipping.
Rich results and better click-throughStructured data makes your listing occupy more space and answer more questions before anybody clicks it.
A stable base for everything elseContent and links compound far better on sound foundations, which is why this work comes before either of them.
Fewer surprises laterA site with documented redirect and indexing rules survives its next redesign considerably better than one without them.
The technical issues I find most often
Six that appear on the majority of sites I audit.
Every site is different, but this handful comes up again and again. You can check your own site against every one of them with the technical SEO audit checklist.
Pages accidentally blocked from indexingA stray noindex tag or an over-eager robots.txt rule can hide an entire section, sometimes for years.
Slow Core Web Vitals on key templatesOne slow layout drags down every URL that uses it, which on a large site means hundreds at once.
Redirect chains and loopsYears of small changes leave redirects pointing at redirects, wasting crawl budget and diluting what each one passes.
Duplicate content from parametersTracking parameters and filters generate endless variations of one page, none of which is clearly the original.
Broken internal links and orphaned pagesA page nothing links to is hard to discover and harder to value, whatever its content is worth.
Missing or broken structured dataWithout schema you miss rich results. With broken schema you can suppress the ones you would otherwise have earned.
Who benefits most
Sites that already have something going for them.
Technical work delivers its sharpest returns where the other ingredients are already present: decent content, a real brand, existing links, and something invisible holding all of it down. There is nothing to unlock on a site that has not earned anything yet.
Larger sites and stores benefit because crawl and indexing problems scale with page count, so the same fault costs more the bigger you get. Businesses recovering from a redesign or migration benefit because that is where technical faults do the most damage in the shortest time. And any owner who has been quietly investing in content for a year benefits by finally letting that investment rank.
How I work as your technical SEO consultant
Diagnose, prioritise, implement, then verify it actually took effect.
I start with a thorough audit and hand you a prioritised list in plain language: what is wrong, why it matters, and what fixing it is likely to be worth. Not a tool export with four hundred rows sorted by severity nobody set. I have written up the difference between those two documents, and the questions that tell you which one you are being sold, in my guide to hiring a technical SEO expert.
From there I either implement the fixes myself or work alongside your developers with specific instructions rather than vague tickets. Then I verify the fixes actually took effect, which is the step most engagements skip and the reason so many audit findings are still open a year later.
Technical SEO agency, company or consultant: which do you actually need?
The difference that matters is in the work, not the invoice.
Search results for technical SEO services are dominated by agencies, so it is worth being clear about what you are actually choosing between.
The practical test is which side your problem sits on. If you already know what is wrong and need hands to fix it at volume, buy capacity. If your content is decent, your rankings will not move and nobody can tell you why, you have a diagnosis problem, and adding people to a diagnosis problem makes it slower rather than faster.
I have written that comparison out in full, including the situations where I would send you to an agency instead, on the freelance SEO consultant page. My own background is there if you want to judge which side of it I actually sit on.
Technical SEO for SaaS, eCommerce and content-heavy sites
Same discipline, three different places to look first.
The issues that cap rankings differ enough by site type that a single generic checklist misses most of them.
SaaSBreaks at the marketing and app boundaryCrawl and indexing rules diverge across subdomains, trial and gated pages get indexed when they should not be, and the comparison and alternative pages carrying your highest-intent searches are often rendered client-side where search engines cannot reliably read them.
eCommerceBreaks on scaleFaceted navigation generates near-infinite URL combinations that consume crawl budget, variants compete with each other, out-of-stock handling quietly sheds rankings, and category pages hold more ranking power than product pages while getting the least attention.
Content-heavyBreaks on structureThin archive and tag pages dilute topical signals, internal linking grows organically rather than deliberately, and years of accumulated redirects turn into chains nobody has traced end to end.
The underlying discipline is identical in all three. What changes is where you look first, and looking in the wrong order is how months get spent on work that was never the constraint.
What technical work has produced
Named clients, not anonymised screenshots.
Technical fixes are invisible until the traffic moves, so here are three engagements with the numbers attached and the clients named. Each one links to the full account of what was done.
“Adib is an SEO guru. Google recognised only 53 of our keywords when he started, after his work that’s 180 worldwide, with several already on page one. Easy to talk to, and he helps you understand his thinking.”Matt LivingstonCEO, Bacanale
“An absolute gem to collaborate with. Swift, thorough, and full of in-depth SEO insight, and he transparently shared every step of his process. I’d wholeheartedly recommend him and will hire him again.”Mirko ScarcellaCEO, Lion ADV Inc
Every site carries different technical debt, so none of that is a forecast. It is evidence that fixing foundations first is what makes everything spent after it actually work.
What technical SEO costs
Published, because you should not have to book a call to find out.
Technical engagements are usually front-loaded. The first quarter is heavier on diagnosis and implementation, and the months after it are lighter and more about holding the gains.
Monthly retainer
£1,500 – £5,000
per month, depending on scope and how competitive your market is. No hourly rate, no minimum term dressed up as a discount.
What the retainer covers
Strategy, and the reasoning behind it in writing
The hands-on technical and on-page work
Monthly reporting, including what did not work
Direct access to me, not a support queue
A working document of every change, yours to keep
Link placements are priced separately and published on my link building page, because buying links and buying strategy are different purchases and folding them into one number hides what you are actually paying for. You approve every placement and its cost before anything is spent.
Diagnosis or executionA first quarter weighted towards finding problems costs differently from a steady month of shipping fixes that are already agreed.
How contested your market isThe same result costs more where everyone else is also trying, because the bar for a page that holds its position is set by whoever is already there.
What your team can shipA client with a developer who can implement changes needs fewer of my hours than one where I am also the person editing the theme.
Three things move where you land in that range: how much of the work is diagnosis rather than ongoing execution, how contested your market is, and whether you have a developer who can implement fixes. I do not publish an hourly rate: quoting by the hour rewards slowness and pushes clients into rationing questions to save money, which is precisely the moment the work goes wrong. Before you commit I will tell you what I think the realistic timeline is and what the first quarter should produce, and if the number does not make sense against what your site could plausibly earn, I will say so.
Technical SEO FAQs
How do I know if I have technical SEO problems?
The usual signs are good content that won’t rank, pages missing from Google, a slow site, or a recent redesign. A technical audit confirms it for certain.
Do you work with my developers?
Yes. I hand off clear, specific instructions with each fix’s priority and expected impact, and can review implementation before it goes live.
Is technical SEO a one-off or ongoing?
Both. There’s an initial fix phase for existing issues, then light ongoing monitoring so new problems (from redesigns, plugins, or platform updates) get caught early.
What is included in technical SEO services?
Crawling and indexing control, site architecture and internal linking, rendering, page speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data, and the redirect and canonical logic underneath all of it. The specific mix depends on what the audit finds, because paying for work your site does not need is the most common way a technical budget gets wasted.
Is technical SEO a one-off project or an ongoing service?
Either, and the diagnosis usually decides. A site with a defined set of issues is a project. A site that keeps generating new ones, because it ships frequently or runs on a platform that changes underneath it, is better served by ongoing monitoring.
Not sure where your quickest wins are?
Book a free, no-obligation call. We’ll look at your site together and I’ll show you the fastest route to results.
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