Technical SEO

Technical SEO in one sentence

If Google can't crawl a page, can't render it or decides it is a duplicate of something else, no amount of good writing will make it rank. Technical SEO removes those obstacles. It is rarely the most exciting part of search work, but on many small business sites it is where the fastest gains hide, because one template-level fix can affect hundreds of pages at once.

The problems I find most often

After years of looking at small business websites, the same handful of technical issues keeps returning:

1. Leftover noindex tags. A developer blocks the staging site from Google, then the setting goes live with the launch. Months later, nobody knows why the site has no traffic.
2. Duplicate versions of the site. http and https, with and without www, with and without trailing slashes, all returning a page instead of redirecting to one version.
3. Redirect chains. Old page to newer page to newest page, sometimes four hops deep, losing link value at every step.
4. Images that weigh more than the rest of the page combined. A 6 MB hero photo straight from a phone is still a common sight.
5. Scripts nobody remembers adding. Chat widgets, old tracking codes and abandoned plugins that load on every page and slow it down.
6. Orphan pages. Pages that exist but have no internal links pointing to them, so Google rarely visits and rarely ranks them.

None of these needs an expensive tool to find. They need someone who reads Search Console regularly and knows where to look in the code.

Core Web Vitals without the jargon

Google measures three things on real visitors' devices: how quickly the main content appears, whether the layout jumps around while loading, and how quickly the page responds when someone taps. These signals are collected from Chrome users and shown in Search Console. They are a ranking factor, though not a dominant one. More importantly, slow pages lose customers before they ever read your offer, especially on mobile data in a parking lot or on a commute. Core Web Vitals for business owners explains the three measurements in plain English.

Sites I build are hand-coded or run on a custom CMS made for the project, which gives full control over what loads. On other platforms I work within what the platform allows and tell you honestly where its limits are.

Structured data and AI search

Structured data is a small block of code that tells search engines facts about the page: this is a business with these hours and this phone number; this product costs this much and is in stock; these are the questions and answers. Google uses it for richer results, and AI search tools increasingly rely on clean, consistent business details too. It complements the work on visibility in ChatGPT and AI search.

What I need from you

Admin or editor access to the site, access to Search Console and GA4, and the contact of whoever controls hosting and the domain, if that isn't you. Nothing more. Every change is logged in a short note, so you always know what was touched and why.

When technical SEO matters most

Three moments call for a careful technical review: before a redesign or platform change, right after a launch, and whenever traffic falls without an obvious reason. A redesign is the riskiest, which is why SEO for website migration is a separate service: redirects, URL mapping and monitoring are planned before anything goes live.

Technical work is part of my ongoing SEO services. On most sites it front-loads the first month or two, then becomes routine monitoring while the focus shifts to content and local visibility. If you'd like to check the basics yourself first, the technical SEO checklist covers what to look at.