Technical SEO.
Engineered, Not Checklist-Worked.
Crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals, schema graphs, migrations, JS rendering and AI-bot allowlisting. The foundation layer every other SEO investment compounds on. Senior-led delivery, named ownership.
Technical SEO is the part nobody applauds when it works.
Crawl budget, indexation, schema, Core Web Vitals, JS rendering, hreflang, migrations, AI-bot allowlisting. Done well, every content and link investment compounds on it. Done poorly, it caps the upside of everything else. We ship it as engineering work, with PR-level fix specs, validation in lower environments, and re-crawl confirmation after every wave.
What we ship
Eight deliverable areas. Each can be scoped as a one-shot engagement (audit + fixes) or as part of an ongoing retainer.
Crawl & indexation health
Full crawl audit (Screaming Frog + log files), index-coverage reconciliation against GSC, fix-list for orphan pages, soft 404s, mis-set noindex, canonical conflicts and crawl-budget waste. Re-crawl validation after every fix wave.
Core Web Vitals & performance
LCP / INP / CLS optimisation against the live mobile field data in GSC. Render-blocking script audit, image-format and srcset hygiene, font-loading discipline, JS hydration audits. Targets the actual page-experience field metrics, not Lighthouse vanity scores.
Schema graph engineering
Nested schema across Organization, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Product, Review, HowTo, SpeakableSpecification - implemented as a graph with explicit @id references, not isolated blocks. Validated against live SERP and AI Overview behaviour.
Site architecture & internal linking
Information architecture mapped to actual buyer queries. Pillar / cluster topology with measurable internal-link equity flow. Breadcrumb hygiene. Orphan-page elimination. Internal-link audit cadence quarterly.
JavaScript & rendering audit
Render-tree inspection on key templates. Hydration timing. Server-side rendering review. We catch the silent indexing leaks JS-heavy SPA and Next.js apps create - empty SSR shells, late-mounted content, server / client mismatches.
Hreflang & international SEO
Bidirectional hreflang validation across all language-region variants. x-default fallback, country-targeting via GSC, IP / ccTLD / subdomain decision frameworks. The single most fault-prone surface on multi-region sites.
Migration safety
Pre / during / post migration playbook. URL mapping with 301 fidelity, rendering parity checks, schema parity checks, redirect-chain audits, GSC and analytics handover. Migrations are where most teams lose 20-40% of organic; we treat them as project-managed engineering.
AI bot allowlisting & retrieval hygiene
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GoogleOther - allowed in robots.txt and not blocked at CDN. llms.txt + IndexNow integration. The infrastructure layer every AEO and GEO programme depends on.
The 5-step technical SEO audit
Two to four weeks for mid-market; 4-6 weeks for enterprise. Phase deliverables let you start fixing critical items inside week two.
Discovery + scoping
Understand the stack, the deploy pipeline, the existing analytics, the prior migrations, the open issues. Identify the queries and templates that drive most of the revenue. Scope the audit to focus on those first.
Full technical crawl
Screaming Frog full-site crawl with custom extraction. Server log analysis (where logs are available) for crawl frequency by template and by bot. GSC index coverage reconciliation. PageSpeed field data review. Lighthouse spot-checks for diagnostic only.
Findings + prioritisation
Issues classified by impact and effort. We build a prioritisation matrix anchored to the actual revenue templates from step 01. The audit deliverable is not a list of 200 issues - it is a sequenced roadmap of the 20 that matter.
Fix execution
We ship the fixes either alongside your engineering team or in our own retainer cadence depending on scope. PR-level reviews on schema, robots, sitemap, canonical and hreflang changes. Validation in lower environments before production.
Re-crawl + measurement
Post-fix re-crawl to confirm resolution. GSC URL Inspection on representative samples. Field-data follow-up at 30, 60 and 90 days to confirm CWV moves are sustained. Quarterly re-audit cadence on retainer.
10 technical SEO killers we catch most often
The same ten issues account for the majority of catastrophic and silent traffic losses we see across audits.
Want all 10 checked on your site?
Free technical scan. We run all 10 against your domain in 48 hours and produce a prioritised fix list. No obligation.
Anonymised outcomes
Three recent technical SEO engagements across the markets we serve. Specifics anonymised.
Mis-set canonicals were attributing top-converting pages to the homepage
Crawl audit caught that 90% of high-converting product pages had a self-referential canonical pointing to root. Fix shipped in 48 hours. Index coverage of priority URLs returned within two weeks; revenue-attributed organic recovered the next quarter.
Migration recovery: 35% of pre-migration organic recovered in 90 days
Inherited a botched migration where the previous agency missed 800+ 301s. URL-mapping re-baseline against archived SERP data, batched 301 deployment, GSC re-validation. Recovered most of the lost organic by month three; full recovery by month six.
Hreflang re-architecture across 6 languages eliminated wrong-country rankings
EN-GB users were being served the FR-FR variant on certain queries because hreflang was missing reciprocal links. Full hreflang + canonical re-implementation; subdomain vs sub-folder decision documented; GSC country-targeting re-set. Wrong-country rankings cleared inside 60 days.
Related services
Frequently asked questions
Both options exist. Pure-technical retainers are common for clients with strong in-house content teams that need engineering-grade technical execution. Most of our clients prefer the integrated retainer where technical, content, link building and AEO all run from one team - it is materially more efficient than coordinating separate vendors. We will scope to whichever model serves you best.
Two to four weeks for the audit and prioritised roadmap on a typical mid-market site (under 50K URLs). Enterprise sites with multi-region complexity, large URL counts or heavy JavaScript take 4-6 weeks. We deliver in two phases: the prioritised roadmap inside week 2, then the deep findings document by the end of week 4. You get to start fixing the critical items without waiting for the long-tail issues.
Screaming Frog for site crawls, Sitebulb for diagnostic visualisation, server log analysers for crawl-frequency data, Google Search Console as the authoritative source of truth, Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights field data for performance, Schema.org validator and Google Rich Results Test for markup, plus internal scripts for hreflang validation and link-graph analysis. We do not lock to a single tool stack.
Either. Most of our retainers run alongside the client's own engineering team - we deliver fix specifications at the PR level, your engineers ship them, we validate. Clients without dedicated frontend or DevOps capacity can have us own implementation directly when the stack supports it.
Yes. This site itself is built on Next.js App Router with strict TypeScript. We are well-versed in the failure modes specific to React and Next - hydration mismatches, dynamic imports breaking SSR, late-mounted content invisible to crawlers, schema scripts emitted as client-only components, ISR / on-demand-revalidation cache pollution. We catch these in the audit, not in production.
Three layers. (1) Diagnostic - issue resolution rate vs the prioritised audit list. (2) Operational - index coverage in GSC, crawl-budget efficiency from log files, Core Web Vitals field data. (3) Outcome - organic clicks and impressions to the affected URL clusters, branded search lift, and ultimately revenue attribution. Diagnostics confirm we shipped; outcomes confirm it mattered.
Yes - and we treat them as the highest-risk SEO project type. Most organic-traffic catastrophes happen during platform, domain or template migrations, not during normal operations. We run a documented pre/during/post playbook with URL mapping, redirect fidelity, schema parity, rendering parity, GSC handover and analytics continuity. If you are planning a migration, talk to us before you commit to a launch date.
Technical SEO is the foundation under both. AI engines cannot cite a page they cannot crawl, render, or extract structure from. The schema graph that wins AEO citations is shipped at the technical layer. The bot-allowlisting that lets GPTBot and PerplexityBot in is a robots.txt and CDN concern. Treating technical SEO and AEO as separate disciplines is the most common reason brands under-perform on AI surfaces.
Free technical audit. No obligation.
We run a full crawl + GSC reconciliation + Core Web Vitals + schema audit on your domain in 48 hours and deliver a prioritised fix list.