Technical SEO that ends in shipped fixes, not a PDF

What technical seo actually means

Technical SEO is everything that decides whether a search engine can reach your pages, render them, index them and understand what they are about. It sits underneath content and links: a page that cannot be crawled will never be judged on its writing, and a page that renders empty will never be judged at all.

The cheaper version of this is SEO website development — building the site correctly in the first place, so the fixes below are never needed. Every build on this site ships with that baseline included, which is why this service exists mainly for sites somebody else built.

What I do differently from most audits is finish the job. The deliverable is not a document describing problems — it is the fixes deployed in your codebase, with a before-and-after record of what changed and how to verify it stayed fixed.

Who this is for

• Sites that publish steadily and get no organic traffic for the effort
• Anyone who has been handed an audit PDF and does not have a developer to implement it
• Sites built on a JavaScript framework where the content may not exist in the HTML
• Businesses about to migrate domain, host or platform, who want the redirect map right the first time
• Anyone who has never checked whether AI crawlers can reach their site — most have not, and a surprising number are blocked

Who it is not for

Saying this out loud costs me some enquiries and saves both of us the ones that would have gone wrong. If you are on this list, I will tell you in the first reply rather than after a deposit.

• Sites with no content problem and no technical problem, which do exist. I will tell you if yours is one
• Anyone looking for a guaranteed ranking position — nobody can honestly sell that
• Link-building campaigns. I do not buy links and will not arrange for anyone else to
• Sites where the real issue is that nobody has written anything worth ranking, in which case technical work will not save it

The problems it solves

Pages not indexed

Crawl and render diagnosis first, then the specific cause named — noindex, canonical conflict, thin content, or a page nothing links to.

Content invisible to crawlers

A view-source word count against the rendered page. If the gap is large, the fix is server rendering or static output.

AI crawlers blocked at the edge

Tested per user-agent. Hosts return 403 to GPTBot and ClaudeBot before robots.txt is read, and nothing in your control panel mentions it.

Core Web Vitals failing

The specific resource on the critical path identified, not a score screenshot.

Structured data that means nothing

Islands of unlinked nodes rebuilt into one graph with resolvable @id references.

Traffic lost after a migration

Redirect chains, stranded URLs and missing mappings found and repaired.

What you get

• Full crawl and indexation audit — what Google can reach, render and index
• Rendering check: exactly what a non-JavaScript crawler receives
• Core Web Vitals diagnosis with the specific code causing each failure
• Schema.org structured data — written, validated and deployed
• Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools setup and sitemap submission
• AI-crawler access check across GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Applebot
• Internal linking and information-architecture recommendations
• Every fix implemented in your codebase, with a before/after record

What is included in the starting price

Everything below is in the $80 figure. Nothing here is quoted as an extra once the build is underway, which is the point of publishing it.

• Full crawl with every issue evidenced by URL, response and line of code
• Rendering check: exactly what a non-JavaScript crawler receives
• AI crawler access test across GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Applebot and CCBot
• Indexation and duplication audit — canonicals, protocol and slash variants, parameters
• Structured data written, validated and deployed
• Core Web Vitals diagnosis with the causing code named
• Internal linking and orphan-page report
• Every fix implemented, with a written before-and-after record

What costs extra, and why

A quote that omits these is not cheaper — it is less honest. Each one is real work that someone has to do, and pretending otherwise is how a fixed price becomes a negotiation in week two.

Content writing

I will tell you what is missing and brief it. Writing it at volume is a separate engagement.

Large-scale migration execution

A full domain or platform migration with thousands of URLs is a project rather than an audit line item.

Ongoing monthly work

Covered by the SEO retainer rather than repeated one-off audits.

Paid search or ads

Not something I do. I will say so rather than take the budget.

How the work runs

1. Crawl. I crawl the site the way a search engine does and record what is actually reachable — not what the sitemap claims.
2. Diagnose. Each issue gets evidence attached: the URL, the response, the file and line. No finding without proof.
3. Prioritise. Ranked by impact, not by count. A hundred trivial warnings are worth less than one blocked crawler.
4. Implement. I make the changes. This is the part most audits leave to you, and it is the part that actually moves rankings.
5. Verify. Re-crawl, re-test, and hand over a written record of what changed and how to check it stayed fixed.

Day by day

3 days from the day scope is signed off. Published as a schedule rather than a promise of speed — you should be able to tell on day three whether a build is on track.

The technology

Deliberately boring, and that is the feature. A stack another developer can pick up is worth more to you than one that impresses other developers.

Crawling

A real crawler plus manual per-user-agent requests, because the two disagree more often than people expect

Rendering

view-source and Search Console URL Inspection — what Google actually received, not a third-party simulation

Performance

Lighthouse for diagnosis, field data for judgement. They answer different questions

Structured data

Schema Markup Validator for correctness, Rich Results Test for eligibility

Implementation

Whatever your site is built in. PHP, WordPress, Astro, static HTML, or a framework I have to read first

What it integrates with

• Google Search Console — verification, sitemap submission, coverage monitoring
• Bing Webmaster Tools, which feeds Microsoft Copilot
• IndexNow for Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver
• Analytics setup, cookieless by preference so no consent banner is required
• Uptime and broken-link monitoring
• CI checks that fail a build on an SEO regression, where your setup allows it

What I need from you

Short list, and the first item matters most. Projects do not usually slip because the code was hard — they slip because a decision waited a week.

• Read access to the codebase, or a developer contact who has it
• Search Console access, or the ability to verify it
• Hosting or CDN access where the fix is at that layer
• A decision on anything commercial — URL changes, page removals, content consolidation
• Honesty about what has been tried before, including anything bought from a previous supplier

Content and photography

Technical work makes a page eligible to rank. It does not make it worth ranking. Where the audit finds that the real problem is thin or missing content, I say so plainly rather than selling more technical work.

The most common version of this: a services page targeting a commercial query with two paragraphs on it, competing against pages that answer the question completely. No amount of schema fixes that.

Performance standards

Targets, not aspirations — measured before handover on a throttled mobile connection rather than on a fast laptop.

Accessibility standards

This site is built to the same standard it sells, and the accessibility statement lists what is conformant and what is not — which is the part most statements leave out.

Security practices

The SEO included in every build

Not an upsell. A site that launches unindexed is a shop with the shutters down, and the work below is cheap during a build and expensive afterwards because the fixes are structural.

Ownership and handover

You own everything: the domain registered to you, hosting in your account, code in a repository you control, and the payment provider account in your business name. Credentials are handed over as they are created rather than at the end.

A supplier who resists this is protecting recurring revenue rather than your interests. If you want the reasoning in full, including how to check your current site, there is a guide on it.

Aftercare and what happens after launch

Thirty days of snag fixes are included. A snag is something that does not work as scoped — not a new feature, and the difference is written down before launch rather than argued about after it.

You also get written handover documentation aimed at whoever maintains the site next, which may well not be me. That is deliberate: the test of a good handover is whether another developer could take over without calling me, and on my projects they can.

Ongoing maintenance

Optional, monthly, cancellable. Nothing here is required to keep what you paid for.

Payment terms

How this compares to the alternatives

Including the routes that do not involve me, because a comparison that only flatters the author is not a comparison.

What could go wrong, and how it is handled

Fixes need code access I do not have

Established before quoting. Where you have a developer, I hand over exact changes rather than vague recommendations.

The platform blocks the correct fix

Some hosted platforms will not allow the right answer. I say so and give you the best available alternative rather than pretending.

Rankings do not move

They may not, and I will not promise otherwise. Technical work removes barriers; it does not manufacture demand or authority.

A fix breaks something else

Changes are made in a branch, reviewed and verified, not typed into production.