Skill
Technical SEO
The layer between your content and Google’s crawler. Crawl budget, indexation rules, site architecture, redirects, canonicals, rendering and speed. On a small site it is a week of work. On a site with tens of thousands of URLs it is usually the biggest lever available.
What this covers
Technical SEO gets used as a catch-all, so here is the specific list of what I work on and what each one actually fixes.
| Area | What goes wrong | What I do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Crawl budget | Google spends its time on filter URLs and never reaches new products | Log file analysis, facet containment, internal link restructuring |
| Indexation | Index is many times larger than the real catalogue | Bucket every URL by evidence, then noindex, 410 or keep |
| Migrations | Traffic drops on launch and nobody knows which URLs broke | Full URL inventory, redirect map, staging QA, launch monitoring |
| Canonicals | Declared canonical ignored, wrong page ranks | Trace the signals Google is actually following, then align them |
| hreflang | Market pages compete with each other | Return tag audit, x-default strategy, per-market architecture |
| Rendering | Content exists for users but not for the crawler | Rendered versus raw comparison, SSR or prerender recommendations |
| Core Web Vitals | Field data fails while lab scores look fine | CrUX first, then the specific element causing LCP or CLS |
| AI crawlers and rendering | GPTBot, Google-Extended and the rest are allowed or blocked by accident, and what they fetch is not what users see | A written policy per crawler, then a rendered versus raw check on the pages you want quoted |
| Snippet controls | nosnippet and max-snippet set years ago now hide the page from AI Overviews | Audit every snippet directive against what you want the AI features to show |
Signs you need this
You do not need a technical audit because it is on a checklist. You need one when the symptoms show up.
- Search Console reports far more indexed pages than you have products or articles.
- New pages take weeks to get indexed, or never do.
- Traffic dropped on a specific date and it lines up with a release, not an algorithm update.
- You rank on page two for terms your content clearly deserves page one for.
- A replatform, redesign or domain change is on the roadmap in the next six months.
- Two of your own pages keep swapping places for the same query.
- Impressions are rising in Search Console’s generative AI report while clicks on the same pages fall.
A fixed scope audit with a prioritised fix list, sized to the site. Every recommendation is risk checked against the rankings you already hold, and anything that carries doubt or no clear upside gets dropped rather than padded in to make the deck longer.
How I work on it
- Take the vitals. Search Console, GA4, a full crawl, server logs and CrUX field data. I want to see what Google actually does on the site.
- Find the bleed. One ranked list of what is costing traffic right now, sized by impact and by shipping difficulty.
- Fix in priority order. Highest impact first, every change checked against existing rankings.
- Prove it. Before and after in Search Console on the exact URLs we touched. Clicks and positions, not impressions.
Related projects
Marvel Refrigeration
IndexationPre-migration audit that sorted every URL by evidence before a redirect map was written.
Read the project →Gupshup
InternationalMarket pages set up early so they did not end up competing as new regions launched.
Read the project →U-Line
TemplatesCannibalisation audit across overlapping product templates, then a new page set.
Read the project →Common questions
How long does a technical SEO audit take?
Two to four weeks for most sites. The crawl and the data pull are fast. The time goes into joining the datasets and working out which findings actually matter, which is the part that makes the difference between a report and a plan.
Do you implement the fixes or just recommend them?
Either. I can hand a prioritised list to your dev team with enough detail to ship without coming back to me, or I can work in the codebase and the CMS myself. Most engagements end up somewhere in between, with me doing the SEO-specific changes and the dev team doing the platform work.
Will fixing technical SEO increase my traffic?
It depends on whether technical is what is holding you back. On a site with index bloat, broken canonicals or a botched migration, yes, and often quickly. On a small clean site with a content problem, a technical audit will find very little worth fixing, and I will tell you that on the first call rather than sell you one.
Do AI crawlers need anything different from Googlebot?
Mostly no. Google’s own guidance is that AI Overviews and AI Mode have no requirements beyond being indexed and snippet-eligible, and Google-Extended only controls training in other Google products, not Search. What does differ is that the third-party assistants fetch with their own crawlers, so the decision to allow GPTBot or PerplexityBot is a business decision about exposure, and it should be written down rather than inherited from a robots.txt someone copied in 2021.
Want to talk through a site?
Twenty minutes, screen shared, your Search Console open. You will leave with at least one thing worth fixing whether or not we end up working together.
Typical reply time: within one working day