What technical SEO actually covers
Technical SEO is the layer of SEO that lives below the content. It is everything a search engine or an AI engine needs in order to crawl your site, understand what each page is about, and judge whether the information is trustworthy enough to serve a human. If content is the message, technical SEO is the delivery mechanism — and if the delivery mechanism is broken, the message never arrives.
For a U.S. local service business, technical SEO is the quiet ceiling on everything else you do. You can publish the best city-specific service page in your market, but if that page takes 7 seconds to load on a mid-range Android, if the sitemap lists it incorrectly, if the canonical points to an older URL, if the schema is malformed — Google still has permission to ignore it. Fixing technical SEO almost never produces headline-grabbing results, but it is the condition under which every other investment finally works.
What is included in our technical SEO engagement
Each technical SEO project starts with a full crawl of your site using the same signals Google and the AI engines use. From there we produce a prioritized action list — high-impact fixes first, cleanup and polish at the end. All fixes are shipped by our team; you do not have to run a developer in parallel.
- Full site crawl covering status codes, canonicals, redirects, orphan pages, sitemap vs. live URL diff, robots.txt accuracy and index coverage
- Core Web Vitals audit and fix cycle on representative mobile and desktop sessions, with before/after Lighthouse reports
- Schema markup audit and expansion: LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Review, Organization, BreadcrumbList — validated with Google Rich Results Test
- Internal linking map rebuild: silo structure, anchor diversity, hub pages that pass PageRank to the money pages
- Duplicate and thin content detection; consolidation plan (301 vs. canonical vs. rewrite) with recommended merges
- JavaScript rendering diagnostics for sites built on React, Next.js, Angular or Shopify — including prerender and SSR recommendations
- HTTPS and mixed content checks; HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 availability; CDN configuration review
- Hreflang implementation review for sites with English and Spanish or English and French versions
- Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools setup, verification and ongoing coverage monitoring
Why Core Web Vitals keep eating your rankings
Since 2021, Google uses Core Web Vitals (loading speed, interactivity and visual stability) as a direct ranking signal. In 2024 the Interaction to Next Paint metric replaced First Input Delay and shifted the goalposts again. In 2025 and 2026 the AI engines started weighting experience signals when picking which sources to cite. The practical effect: a slow, janky mobile site is now simultaneously (1) a Google ranking liability, (2) an AI citation liability and (3) a conversion liability.
The common failure mode we see on local service websites is not the engineering — it is accumulated weight: unused jQuery, three analytics scripts, a chat widget, a popup builder, a page builder that ships 300 KB of CSS. The site is fast when the agency hands it over and dies 18 months later because every vendor added a tag. Our technical SEO engagement includes a scheduled quarterly re-audit for exactly this reason.
How we work with your development team (or without one)
Most of our clients do not have a developer on staff. For WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Wix sites we ship the fixes directly. For custom codebases we deliver the fix list as pull requests or as a developer-ready specification. For sites behind a vendor contract, we coordinate the fix with the vendor and verify the deploy.
We work in two-week sprints. Each sprint ends with a before/after snapshot of the specific metrics we moved — crawl health, Core Web Vitals scores, index coverage, schema coverage — so you can see exactly what shifted.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a technical SEO engagement take?
The initial audit takes 7–10 business days. The fix sprint typically runs 30–60 days for a small/mid-size local service site, longer for sites with 1,000+ URLs or sites behind complex vendor contracts. After the initial cleanup we recommend a quarterly re-audit to catch regressions.
Do you need admin access to my website?
Yes, for WordPress or Shopify sites we need admin access to ship fixes. For custom builds we can work from a staging environment and deliver fixes as PRs. For sites behind a vendor, we coordinate with the vendor; access depends on their rules.
Is technical SEO enough to rank, or do I also need content and links?
Technical SEO alone will not get you to the top of the Local Pack. It removes the ceiling. Think of it as the condition that lets content and links do their job. For a complete rank-and-stay strategy pair technical SEO with Local SEO and either Pro Audit follow-through or the Complete Growth Package.
How does technical SEO affect AI visibility?
A lot. Clean schema, fast load times, correct canonicals and complete sitemaps all raise the probability that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity will cite your page. Technical SEO is the shared foundation beneath both traditional SEO and GEO — the two disciplines use the same signals.
How much does technical SEO cost?
Our one-time technical SEO engagement starts at $1,900 for sites under 100 URLs and scales with site complexity. The ongoing retainer, with quarterly re-audits and monitoring, is bundled inside Local SEO ($349/mo) and the Complete Growth Package ($449/mo).
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