Technical SEO Services
Technical SEO services that clear what is blocking growth
SearchCounselCo runs technical SEO audits for ecommerce and regulated-category businesses in the US, UK and Europe. Good content cannot rank if a crawler never reaches it, a renderer never sees it, or an index never stores it. We find which gate your site is failing, rank the fixes by impact against effort, and hand your developers a roadmap in the order it should be done.
You probably need this if
- "Crawled, currently not indexed" is climbing in Search Console
- Traffic dropped after a redesign, migration or CMS change
- Important pages sit three or more clicks from the homepage
- Content is invisible to AI answer engines that do not run JavaScript
- Rankings are flat while the content team keeps publishing
- An audit was delivered and nobody knows which item to do first
- 01CrawlA bot reaches the URL
- 02RenderIt sees the full content
- 03IndexGoogle stores the right versionBlocked
- 04Rank & citeIt competes, or an AI quotes it
What we fix
What our technical SEO services fix, layer by layer
Content and links decide how well you compete. Technical SEO decides whether you get to compete. Each area below links to the guide where we document our approach publicly.
Crawling and crawl budget
Blocked paths, orphan pages, redirect chains and faceted URLs that burn crawl budget before Googlebot reaches anything commercial. On larger sites we read server log files to see where crawl actually goes.
What you'd seeCrawl stats show heavy requests against few unique pages
Guide: fixing crawl errorsSite architecture and URLs
Click depth, internal linking, XML sitemap hygiene, 301 versus 302, and hreflang on international sites, so equity reaches the pages that earn money.
What you'd seeService pages sit three or more clicks from the homepage
Guide: site architectureRendering and JavaScript
Google runs JavaScript. Most AI crawlers do not. Content that appears only after scripts execute is invisible to the engines deciding what to cite.
What you'd seeRendered HTML differs from the raw HTML in URL Inspection
Guide: JavaScript SEOIndexing and index quality
Rogue noindex tags, orphaned URLs, and index coverage problems where Google has crawled a page but decided not to store it. Each has a specific cause.
What you'd see“Crawled, currently not indexed” climbing in the Pages report
Guide: fixing indexing problemsCanonicals and duplication
Conflicting canonical signals, parameter duplicates and near-identical templates that split ranking signals across URLs that all lose.
What you'd see“Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical”
Guide: canonical tagsCore Web Vitals and speed
Page speed measured on real users rather than lab scores: LCP, INP, CLS and the server response time behind them, assessed against mobile-first indexing.
What you'd seeLCP over 2.5s or INP over 200ms in field data
Guide: Core Web VitalsStructured data
Schema that earns rich results in Google and gives AI systems the unambiguous signals they need to cite a page rather than paraphrase it.
What you'd seeRich results lost after a template or plugin change
Guide: schema markupAI crawler access
Training bots versus retrieval bots, robots.txt directives, and the CDN toggle that silently removes a site from AI answers entirely.
What you'd seeRanking in Google but never cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity
Guide: robots.txt for the AI eraSecurity and delivery
HTTPS consistency, mixed content, and the server-level conditions that affect crawl efficiency and whether AI systems treat a source as safe.
What you'd seeMixed-content warnings or inconsistent HTTPS redirects
Guide: HTTPS and site securityHow we prioritise
How we prioritise a technical SEO audit
Most audits list everything and rank nothing, which is why they sit untouched. We sort findings into four groups so your developers know what to do first and what can wait.
Revenue blockers
Issues affecting commercial pages, lead paths or core service URLs directly. Nothing downstream matters until these clear.
ExampleCanonical conflict excluding 140 category URLs from the index
Crawl and index blockers
Problems that stop search engines discovering or storing the right version of a page. They cap the ceiling on everything else.
ExampleA rogue noindex left on a template after a staging push
Performance limiters
Template-level speed and stability issues. Real, but they raise how well you compete rather than whether you compete.
ExampleLCP at 3.1s on mobile category templates
Scale risks
Patterns that are harmless today and serious once the catalogue or content library doubles. Documented, monitored, not urgent.
ExampleFaceted URLs that multiply the moment the catalogue expands
Every item carries the reason it sits where it does. If we cannot explain why an issue outranks another on the list, it does not go on the list. That constraint is what makes the roadmap something your developers can argue with, which is the only kind they act on.
When this matters most
Six moments when technical SEO matters most
Ordered by when they happen. The first three are cheaper to handle before the work starts than after it ships.
Before a redesign
We review structure, templates, internal pathways and risk areas before design decisions quietly cost visibility.
Cost of missing itA relaunch that looks better and ranks worse
Guide: site architectureDuring a migration
Protecting URL equity, redirect logic, canonical consistency and structured-data continuity through a domain, CMS or structural change.
Cost of missing itLost URL equity that takes months to rebuild
Guide: URL structure and redirectsDuring expansion
When a site adds hundreds of product, location or content URLs, decisions that felt trivial start affecting the whole system.
Cost of missing itCrawl budget spent on URLs nobody searches
Guide: crawl budgetAfter a traffic drop
Establishing whether crawl, indexation, rendering or a template change caused the decline, before anyone rewrites content that was never the problem.
Cost of missing itMonths rewriting content when the cause was technical
Guide: GSC performance reportEcommerce catalogues
Faceted navigation, pagination and parameter duplicates can spawn thousands of near-identical URLs from a few hundred products.
Cost of missing itNear-duplicate URLs competing with each other
Guide: faceted navigationAI search visibility
If your content only exists after JavaScript runs, or a CDN blocks retrieval bots, AI answer engines cite a competitor instead.
Cost of missing itRanking in Google, invisible in AI answers
Guide: machine-first architectureBy platform
Technical SEO for the stack you actually run
Every platform fails in its own way. A technical SEO agency that treats WordPress and Shopify the same will miss the problems specific to each.
WordPress
Plugin overlap, archive and taxonomy bloat, duplicate template output, redirect plugins fighting each other, and page-builder weight dragging Core Web Vitals.
Shopify
Collection and product URL duplication, faceted filters spawning near-identical pages, thin tag archives, and limited control over canonical and robots directives.
Webflow
Clean builds that still need deliberate structure: internal linking depth, collection URL planning, and schema that scales past the first fifty pages.
Headless & JavaScript
React, Next.js and Vue sites where rendering strategy decides visibility, and where AI crawlers that skip JavaScript see a different page from Googlebot.
Ecommerce at scale
Catalogues where pagination, parameters and out-of-stock handling multiply URLs faster than crawl budget can absorb them. Faceted navigation guide.
Regulated categories
CBD, hemp and restricted-ad verticals where technical work has to hold up alongside compliance review, not just ranking goals.
Evidence
Technical SEO results from a real Search Console account
A CBD and hemp retailer whose refreshed content could not be reached: commercial pages sat deep in the structure, internal equity pooled in blog posts, and duplicate URLs split the signals between them.
- 01Internal link architecture rebuiltEquity was routed out of blog archives and into product and category pages, shortening the crawl path to every commercial URL.
- 02Duplication resolvedNear-identical URLs were consolidated so ranking signals stopped competing with each other across versions of the same page.
- 03Crawl paths shortenedPages that mattered commercially moved closer to the homepage, so discovery stopped depending on a bot going four levels deep.
Scope, stated honestly This was a full engagement, not a technical-only one. Content refresh and dedicated local pages contributed to these numbers. The technical share is what made the rest reachable — refreshed content cannot earn clicks from a URL that crawlers struggle to find or that competes with a duplicate.
See how the engagement was scopedNo figure on this page is estimated, modelled, or taken from a third-party rank tracker.
What you receive
What your technical SEO audit delivers
- Prioritised technical audit grouped by severity, with reasoning attached to every item
- Crawl and indexation findings from Search Console and a full-site crawl
- Site architecture observations including click depth and internal link support
- Rendering assessment for both Googlebot and non-JavaScript AI crawlers
- Core Web Vitals review using field data, not lab scores alone
- Structured data review against current rich-result eligibility
- robots.txt and sitemap review including AI crawler access
- Redirect and canonical recommendations with the exact URLs affected
- Developer-ready tickets written to be pasted into Jira or Linear
- Post-fix QA review confirming the implementation matches the recommendation
- Format
- A written document, not a dashboard link
- Handover
- Tickets ready to paste into your tracker
- Ownership
- Everything produced stays yours, during and after
Everything is written to be used by the people who will implement it. Where your team executes in-house, the engagement can stop at the roadmap and review stage — that is how our SEO consulting works. Where you would rather it was handled end to end, we implement alongside your developers.
Common questions
Technical SEO services: common questions
What is included in technical SEO services?
A technical SEO audit covers crawlability, indexation, rendering, site architecture, URL structure and redirects, canonicalisation, Core Web Vitals, HTTPS, structured data, XML sitemaps and robots directives — including AI crawler access. Every technical SEO agency runs a similar checklist. What separates them is prioritisation: SearchCounselCo ranks findings by impact against effort and attaches the reasoning to each one. Our full methodology is published in the technical SEO guide.
How is technical SEO different from on-page SEO?
Technical SEO is the machine-facing layer that decides whether a page can be crawled, rendered, indexed and trusted at all. On-page SEO works on the content once the page is eligible — intent match, headings, internal linking context and page-level messaging. Technical work gets you into the running; on-page decides how well you compete.
Do you only provide audits, or do you implement too?
Both. Some clients want a technical SEO consultant for diagnosis and roadmap only, and have their own developers execute. Others want implementation handled alongside their team. Where scope includes it, we also run a post-fix QA review so the technical result matches the recommendation, which is where a lot of audit value normally leaks away.
Does technical SEO matter for AI search and ChatGPT?
It is arguably more important there than in Google. Google renders JavaScript; most AI retrieval crawlers do not, so content that appears only after scripts run is invisible to them. Crawler access, clean HTML and indexable pages decide whether you are eligible to be cited at all. We cover this in machine-first architecture and AI crawler access.
Can technical SEO fix a traffic drop after a migration?
Often, yes — and migrations are one of the most common causes. Broken redirect logic, lost canonical consistency, changed URL patterns and dropped structured data all produce declines that look like content problems. Diagnosis starts by establishing whether the drop is crawl, index, rendering or ranking, because each points somewhere different.
Do small sites need technical SEO services?
Smaller sites rarely have crawl budget problems, but they very often have indexing gaps, duplicate URLs, weak internal structure or rendering issues. Technical SEO is also one of the most winnable areas for a smaller site, because a clean, fast, well-structured site can be crawled and cited more reliably than a bloated one with far more authority.
What makes a good technical SEO agency?
Three things you can check before signing anything. Whether they show you real Search Console data rather than third-party tool estimates. Whether every recommendation carries a reason you could challenge. And whether they will say which issues can wait — an agency that marks everything urgent has not prioritised anything. Our technical SEO guide documents the same method we use on client work, so you can judge the thinking before you enquire.
How long does technical SEO take to show impact?
It varies by fix. Unblocking a crawler or removing a rogue noindex can restore indexing within days of a recrawl. Architecture and speed work shows over weeks as pages are reassessed. Technical work removes ceilings more than it adds instant ranking, so the payoff often appears as your content and links finally start landing.
What do technical SEO services cost?
Scope drives cost, so SearchCounselCo quotes after the free technical SEO audit rather than before it. The audit establishes how much work each fix actually needs, and the quote follows from that. Engagements are month to month with 30 days' notice, and Search Console, Analytics and every account stay in your name.
Start with the diagnosis
Get a free technical SEO audit of your site
Send your domain. You get back a written review of your Search Console performance, the technical blockers we can see from the outside, and the pages closest to earning more.
- 1You send a domainNothing else. No call booked, no access granted.
- 2Rahul reviews itWritten reply within two business days, from a person.
- 3You decideUse the findings yourself, or talk about scope. No obligation.
Prefer to read first? The technical SEO guide documents the same method in full.