Service / S-02

Technical SEO, inspected properly

Search engines need to reach, render and understand your pages before content or links can do anything. We find what is getting in the way and fix it or specify the fix for your developer.

Derby has a lot of engineering companies, and engineers tend to like this part of SEO because it behaves like any other system: there are inputs, failure modes and measurable outputs. A page that cannot be crawled will not rank, however good the writing. A site that sends search engines round in circles of filtered URLs wastes the attention it gets.

What a technical review covers

Crawlability. Robots rules, internal links, orphaned pages, redirect chains and broken links.
Indexing. Which pages Google has chosen to index, which it has excluded and why. The Page Indexing report in Search Console often explains more than any third-party tool.
Duplication and canonicals. Parameter URLs, printer versions, trailing slash variants, http and https copies, staging sites left open.
Rendering. Whether important content and links appear in the HTML or only after JavaScript runs.
Speed and Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint, layout shift and interaction responsiveness, measured from field data where there is enough of it.
Structured data. Organisation, LocalBusiness, Product, Article and Breadcrumb markup that is valid and matches what is on the page.
Site architecture. How many clicks it takes to reach key pages, and whether your navigation reflects how customers think.

What you get

A prioritised list, not a 90-page export. Each item says what is wrong, why it matters, how confident we are that fixing it will help, and exactly what needs to change. If you have a developer or an agency looking after the site, we write the tickets for them and check the work once it is live. If you do not, we can make many of the changes ourselves on WordPress and Shopify.

When to bring it forward

Technical work should come first if you are about to migrate or redesign, if traffic dropped sharply after a change, if Search Console shows large numbers of excluded pages, or if you run an online shop with filtered navigation. For a ten-page brochure site it is usually a short check rather than a project.

Who it is for in Derby

Technical SEO matters most for sites with scale or complexity: online shops with filters, manufacturers with large product or part catalogues, firms whose sites were built years ago and extended many times, and businesses about to change platform. Many supply-chain companies around Sinfin, Pride Park and Raynesway fall into the last two groups, with websites that have grown by accretion and never been checked as a whole.

The process, step by step

Access and baseline. Search Console, Analytics and a full crawl. We record indexed pages, excluded pages, Core Web Vitals field data and organic landing pages.
Crawl analysis. Broken links, redirect chains, orphaned pages, duplicate titles, canonical conflicts and parameter URLs.
Index review. We compare what you want indexed with what Google has indexed and look for the reasons behind any gap.
Rendering and templates. We check key templates (home, service, product, category, article) with JavaScript on and off, and test structured data.
Speed review. We identify the specific assets or scripts holding back load times, rather than reporting a single score.
Prioritised fix list. Each item rated by impact and effort, with tickets ready for whoever implements it.
Implementation and checking. We make or oversee the fixes, re-crawl, and confirm in Search Console that the change has been picked up.

A typical fix list

Issue	Why it matters	Typical effort
Staging or old domain still indexable	Duplicate copies compete with the live site	Low
Filter and sort URLs crawlable	Wastes crawl attention on near-duplicates	Medium
Redirect chains after past redesigns	Slows crawling and dilutes link value	Low to medium
Key pages only reachable through search or JavaScript menus	Search engines may not find them	Medium
Oversized images and unused scripts	Slow pages on mobile connections	Medium
Missing or invalid structured data	Lost eligibility for richer results	Low

How long it takes and what drives the cost

A technical review for a small business site takes a few days of work; a large ecommerce or multi-language site can take a few weeks. Cost depends on the number of templates and URLs, how the site is built, whether log files are involved and who implements the fixes. We quote a fixed price for the review and an estimate for implementation once we know who is doing it.

Results depend on the problem. Fixing an accidental "noindex" can restore traffic within days. Improving crawl efficiency on a large shop shows over weeks to months as Google recrawls.

Common mistakes

Treating a third-party "site health score" as the goal. Many flagged items do not matter.
Blocking pages in robots.txt that also carry a noindex tag, so Google never sees the noindex.
Redirecting every removed page to the home page.
Installing several SEO or speed plugins that conflict with each other.
Launching a redesign without comparing old and new URLs, see our redesign checklist.

How we measure it

Indexed pages that should be indexed, crawl errors resolved, Core Web Vitals field data, and organic visibility for the templates we changed. We report these against the baseline taken at the start.

Technical SEO is the foundation for ecommerce SEO and migration support. It is also the first chapter of every SEO audit. Engineering firms may want to read about capability pages that buyers trust, and we work with firms across the city and in towns such as Burton upon Trent.

Questions we are often asked

Do we need technical SEO for a small brochure site?

Usually only a short check. Small WordPress or Squarespace sites tend to have a handful of issues, such as slow images or missing titles, that can be fixed in a few hours.

Will you need access to our server or hosting?

Not normally. Search Console, Analytics and a crawl cover most of what we need. Server log files help on larger sites, and we ask for them only when they would change our conclusions.

Can you make the changes, or only recommend them?

Both. On WordPress and Shopify we can make many changes ourselves. On bespoke builds we write precise tickets for your developer and check the result.

Is page speed a big ranking factor?

It is one signal among many and rarely decisive on its own. A very slow site does lose visitors before the page loads, which matters for enquiries regardless of rankings.

What is the difference between an audit and ongoing technical SEO?

An audit is a one-off diagnosis. Ongoing technical work suits larger or frequently changing sites, such as online shops, where new problems appear as products and pages are added.

Next step

Tell us what you are trying to rank for

Send a few lines about your business and the searches that matter. We reply by email within two working days with an honest view of what is worth doing.

Send an enquiry