Why technical SEO comes first
For a page to appear in search results it has to clear three stages: Google has to find it, be able to crawl it, and consider it worth indexing. A page blocked at any of those stages does not rank, no matter how well it is written.
The most expensive mistakes we find live here. It is not unusual to discover that half the pages a business spent months producing were never indexed, or that a site redesign dropped every old URL without redirects and threw away all the accumulated authority. That is why every programme starts with a technical audit.
Crawlability and indexing
What we check under this heading:
- robots.txt and meta robots. Sections blocked unintentionally, or the reverse — pages that should not be indexed (thank-you pages, filter combinations) left open
- Canonical tags. The same content reachable from several addresses (www/non-www, http/https, trailing slash) with no declaration of which one is canonical
- Sitemap. Does it exist, is it current, does it contain pages that shouldn't be indexed, is it referenced from robots.txt
- Redirects. Broken internal links, redirect chains, URLs orphaned by a site migration
- Search Console coverage report. Which pages are excluded from the index and why — the most direct diagnostic source there is
The critical step in any redesign is the redirect map. Every migration that does not map old URLs to new ones with 301s resets the rankings those URLs had accumulated. Most "traffic dropped after the relaunch" complaints trace back to this.
Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Google's user experience metrics measure three things: how fast the main content appears (LCP), how quickly the page responds to interaction (INP), and how much the content shifts while loading (CLS).
Their direct effect on ranking is usually overstated. The real importance is elsewhere: on a slow, jumping page the visitor leaves before filling in the form. Visitors arriving from local search are already at the decision stage, so every one lost here is a lost customer directly.
We focus on the practical fixes: serving images in the right format and size, deferring render-blocking scripts, removing unused CSS and JS, and setting a sane font-loading strategy. Scoring 100 is not the goal; the user seeing the first screen quickly is.
Structured data
Structured data (schema.org) lets Google read the information on a page in a machine-readable form. The types that matter for local businesses:
| Type | What it does |
|---|---|
LocalBusiness and its subtypes | Defines the business entity; strengthens the match between profile and site |
Service | Clarifies which service a page describes and who provides it |
FAQPage | Can earn expandable question-and-answer display in results |
BreadcrumbList | Shows site hierarchy instead of a raw URL, lifting click-through rate |
Organization + sameAs | Binds site, business profile and social accounts into one entity |
The detail we care about in setup: every schema block ties back to the same business
entity through a fixed @id. Writing disconnected schema page by page leads
Google to see several unrelated entities instead of one business.
hreflang on multilingual sites
On sites publishing in more than one language, the most common error we find is every page declaring hreflang for every language — including pages that have no translation. When Google follows the link and finds no counterpart, it can discard the whole hreflang cluster.
The correct setup is to declare hreflang only between pages that genuinely correspond, and
to leave market-specific pages out of the cluster entirely. Each page also needs to
reference itself, and x-default has to be defined.
What the audit covers
On the technical side the free audit reports: pages excluded from the index and why, broken links and redirect chains, canonical conflicts, missing or malformed structured data, mobile usability errors and first-screen load time. Findings are ordered by impact — you do not need to fix everything at once, and usually one or two of them are what is holding the rankings down.
Technical fixes alone are rarely enough. Once the ground is solid, on-page and content take over.