Service
Technical SEO: the problems Search Console shows in ten minutes
Technical SEO is the part of the work that makes a website crawlable, indexable and fast, and it is where most sites we audit are losing the most for the least reason. On one client's e-commerce site, 71 of 120 pages were indexed when we started; 53 product pages had been silently dropped, and 33 of them were back in Google's index within a week of the fix. Technical work is included in month one of every tier from £399 a month, and checked every month after.
71/120
pages indexed when we started, e-commerce client
33 of 53
dropped product pages restored within a week
65 → 96
mobile performance, a tuning site rebuilt
11 of 22
pages of a new site indexed four days after launch
The five areas
What technical SEO covers, and the pass mark for each
Each area has a check anyone can repeat and a pass mark we hold the site to. The table is the same one we use in the audit.
| Area | The check | Pass mark |
|---|---|---|
| Indexing | Search Console Pages report against the sitemap; URL inspection on any page marked crawled or discovered but not indexed. | Every page you want to rank is indexed; every page you do not is noindexed or removed, not left to chance. |
| Crawl | A crawl of the site for redirect chains, 404s, orphan pages, canonical errors and pages blocked by robots.txt. | No chain longer than one hop; no page reachable only from the sitemap; one canonical per page and it points at itself. |
| Speed | PageSpeed Insights on the home page and the two busiest service pages, mobile first; field data from the Chrome UX Report where the site has enough traffic. | Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on a phone; performance score 90 or above. |
| Structure | Titles, headings, internal links, breadcrumbs, structured data validated with Google's tool. | One H1 per page, a keyword-first title under 60 characters, every page linked from at least one other, no markup errors. |
| Migrations | Old URL to new URL map, redirects tested before the switch, Search Console watched daily for a fortnight after. | No 404s from old URLs, impressions steady within four weeks of the move. |
Indexing, in detail
Why Google drops pages, and how the air-conditioning client got 33 back
A Bulgarian air-conditioning company came to us with a site of 120 pages, of which Search Console showed 71 indexed. The 53 missing pages were products, and they had not been penalised: Search Console listed them as “crawled, currently not indexed”, which is Google's way of saying it looked and decided the page was not worth keeping.
That label almost always comes from one of three things: pages too similar to each other to be worth indexing twice, pages with no internal links pointing at them, or a sitemap that no longer matches the site. The fix is structural rather than more words: make each page say something its neighbour does not, link to it from a page Google already values, and resubmit. Within a week of the fix 33 of the 53 were back in the index, and the report said 33, not 53, because the week-one number is not the whole story.
Speed, in detail
A tuning site from 65 to 96 without changing what it said
An established vehicle tuning business had a site built elsewhere: a hero image the size of a short film loading on every visit, a dozen scripts, fonts pulled from three places, and six area pages that were 72 per cent identical to each other. On a phone the home page took eleven seconds to become usable.
The rebuild kept the pages, the URLs and the copy that was working. Images were served in AVIF at the size the screen needed, scripts were cut to the two that did something, the fonts came from one place, and the area pages were rewritten so that each said something the others did not (duplication down to 29 per cent). Largest Contentful Paint went from 11.0 to 2.4 seconds and the mobile performance score from 65 to 96, measured on the live site with PageSpeed Insights after deployment. Speed is the one part of SEO that is verifiable the same day.
Migrations
Moving to a new site without losing what the old one earned
Most ranking losses after a redesign are self-inflicted: URLs change and nobody redirects them, page titles are rewritten by a designer who has never seen the query report, and pages that had links are dropped because they looked old. The fix is a spreadsheet before the switch, not a panic after it.
Before the move we export every URL Google has indexed and every URL with clicks in the last twelve months, map each to its new address, and keep the titles of any page with a top-twenty position. The redirects are tested on the staging site. On the day, the sitemap is submitted within the hour and Search Console is watched daily for two weeks, because the first sign of a missed redirect is a rise in 404s on the Pages report, and it shows within days.
Related
Where technical work leads
Questions about technical SEO
How do we know if our problem is technical?
Open Search Console's Pages report. If the number of indexed pages is well below the number of pages you have, or the 'crawled, currently not indexed' and 'discovered, currently not indexed' rows are long, the problem is technical before it is anything else. If you have never opened Search Console, the free audit does this for you.
Is a technical SEO fix a one-off or a retainer?
The first pass is a one-off and is included in month one of every tier. After that it is a check each month and a fuller pass each quarter, because sites drift: a plugin update adds a redirect, a new page goes out without a title, a developer leaves noindex on a template.
Do you need access to our hosting or code?
For most fixes, access to the CMS is enough: titles, redirects, images, sitemap. For speed and structure work on a custom-built site we need the repository or the developer's ear. We say which in the audit and we never make a change on a live site without telling you first.
We are moving to a new website. Can you stop us losing rankings?
Yes, if we are involved before the switch. A migration loses rankings when old URLs are not redirected one to one, when titles change without reason, or when the new site drops pages that had links. We map every old URL to its new one, keep what works, and watch Search Console daily for the first fortnight.
Will a faster site rank higher?
Modestly for ranking, heavily for whether anyone stays. Google's page experience signals are a tie-breaker between otherwise similar pages, not a lever on their own. A site that takes six seconds on a phone loses the visitor before the page ranks or not, and that loss is measurable in Analytics.
Does technical SEO include structured data?
Yes. Organisation, service, breadcrumb, FAQ and article markup where it is true, validated with Google's tool, and product markup on shops. Structured data is also one of the things AI assistants read when they decide whether to name a business, which is covered on the AI search page.
Find out how many of your pages Google actually has
Send the address. The audit reads Search Console's indexing report, runs PageSpeed on a phone, crawls the site for chains and orphans, and lists the fixes in the order they matter.