Technical SEO
The work that decides whether anything else you do gets counted.
Technical SEO is the part nobody sees and every other part depends on. If Google cannot crawl the page, render it, and trust what it says, then your content, your links and your reviews are being graded on a paper the examiner never opened.
What technical SEO actually covers.
The phrase gets used loosely. Here is the specific list of things we own when technical SEO is part of your plan, and what each one is really asking.
Crawling
Can Google reach every page that matters, and is it wasting its budget on pages that do not? Robots rules, internal link depth, orphan pages, faceted URLs, redirect chains and pagination.
Indexing
Of the pages Google can reach, which ones has it actually kept? Index coverage, canonical conflicts, accidental noindex, duplicate URLs serving the same content, and sitemaps that tell the truth.
Rendering
Does the page Google sees match the page a person sees? JavaScript that hides content from the crawler, lazy loading that never fires, and content injected after the render window closes.
Site speed and Core Web Vitals
Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, measured on real visits rather than a lab score. Images, fonts, render-blocking scripts and third-party tags.
Structured data
Schema that matches what is on the page, not a wish list. Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, Product, FAQ, Article and Breadcrumb, validated and monitored so a plugin update does not quietly break it.
Site architecture
URL structure, hierarchy, breadcrumbs and internal linking. Whether the pages you care most about are the easiest ones to reach, or buried four clicks from the homepage.
Why it is usually the cheapest win available.
Content and links cost money every month. A technical fix is usually a one-off that keeps paying. A canonical pointing at the wrong URL, a sitemap that has not regenerated since spring, a template that ships the same title tag on two hundred pages: each of those suppresses work you have already paid for.
That is the honest case for doing the technical pass first. You are not buying more rankings. You are stopping the leak in the ones you already earned.
A live example from our own site. While auditing rundigital.com in September 2026 we found our own XML sitemap was serving a copy roughly two days stale, listing our pricing page as last modified on 15 September when WordPress had it modified on the 17th. Six pages published that week were missing from it entirely. We publish that because it is exactly the class of problem a technical audit exists to catch, and it happens to everybody.
How the work actually runs.
- Crawl and baselineFull crawl of the site, cross-referenced against Search Console coverage and live index status. You get the list of what is broken before anyone touches anything.
- Triage by revenue, not by countTwo hundred issues on pages nobody visits matter less than one issue on the page that takes your bookings. We rank fixes by the traffic and money sitting behind them.
- Fix, in your accountsThe work happens in your site, your hosting, your Search Console. Nothing is done in an account you cannot log into.
- Verify in the indexA fix is not finished when the code ships. It is finished when Google has recrawled the page and the coverage report agrees. We check rather than assume.
- MonitorTechnical debt comes back. Plugin updates, theme changes and new templates reintroduce old problems, so the crawl runs on a schedule rather than once.
What it costs.
Technical SEO is not sold separately here. It sits inside the SEO discipline at every level, because a plan that buys content while the site cannot be crawled properly is a plan that wastes your money. The level you pick sets how much work gets done each month, not whether the technical side is included.
- SEO Hyper$399 / month
- SEO Starter$699 / month
- SEO Advanced$1,249 / month
Flat monthly fees. No percentage of ad spend. Build your own plan and see the number before giving us anything.
Where technical SEO sits next to everything else.
Search work splits into a few disciplines that depend on each other. Technical is the foundation, and these are the others.
Questions people actually ask.
What is the difference between technical SEO and on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is about what a page says: the title, the headings, the copy, the internal links, whether it answers the question someone typed. Technical SEO is about whether that page can be found, loaded and understood at all. You can write a perfect page and get nothing if it is not indexed, and you can have a flawless crawl and get nothing if every page is thin. They are different jobs and both are needed.
How long does a technical SEO audit take?
The crawl and the written findings take a few days. Implementation depends on what turns up and who controls the site. A canonical fix or a sitemap rebuild can ship the same week. A template rebuild or a migration off a platform that blocks indexing is a project, and we will say so rather than pretending it is a quick win.
Do I need technical SEO if my site is brand new?
Usually less of it, and that is the point of building the site properly in the first place. New sites on a clean build still ship with the common problems: no sitemap submitted, staging left indexable, schema missing, images at full resolution. It is far cheaper to set it right at launch than to unpick it in a year.
Will fixing Core Web Vitals improve my rankings?
Sometimes, and rarely on its own. Page experience is a real but small signal, and a fast page that does not answer the question still loses to a slower page that does. The stronger argument for speed is conversion rather than ranking: people leave slow pages, and that costs you money whatever Google does.
Can you do technical SEO if my site is not on WordPress?
Yes. The principles do not change across platforms, though what is possible does. Some hosted website builders restrict access to robots rules, redirects or schema, and where a platform genuinely blocks the fix we will tell you that the honest answer is a rebuild rather than sell you work that cannot be done.
Who owns the work when we stop?
You do, all of it. The site is yours, the hosting is yours, Search Console is in your name and the schema and fixes live in your codebase. There is nothing to hand back because none of it was ever held somewhere you could not reach.
Want to know what is actually broken?
We will run the crawl and tell you what we find, including when the honest answer is that your technical setup is fine and your money is better spent elsewhere.