Search Engine Optimisation
Technical SEO
The unglamorous layer underneath everything else. Get it wrong and content and links cannot compensate; get it right and it stops being a topic of conversation.
Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines crawl, render and index a site properly. The Nexclick audits crawl paths, indexation, rendering, speed and structure, then fixes what is actually blocking rankings. Most sites have three or four real problems, not the ninety a tool will report.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- Search Console shows thousands of pages "Discovered — currently not indexed" and nobody has explained why.
- You publish content and it takes weeks to appear in the index, if it appears at all.
- A tool audit returned 4,000 errors and you have no idea which twelve actually matter.
- The site is built in JavaScript and you have been told, vaguely, that this is "a problem for SEO".
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Full crawl against a rendered DOM
- Crawled the way Google does, with JavaScript executed, so we see the page it sees rather than the HTML your server sent. Client-rendered navigation that crawlers cannot follow is one of the most common findings.
- Indexation analysis in Search Console
- Every exclusion reason worked through in turn. "Crawled — currently not indexed" usually means a quality or duplication judgement, not a technical fault, and treating it as technical wastes months.
- Crawl budget and internal link depth
- Which pages sit more than three clicks from the homepage, where crawl effort is being spent on faceted URLs and parameters, and what to block rather than what to add.
- Core Web Vitals from field data
- CrUX field data, not a single lab test on a fast connection. Lab scores and real user experience routinely disagree, and Google uses the latter.
- Canonical, redirect and status code audit
- Redirect chains collapsed, conflicting canonicals resolved, soft 404s identified, and pages returning 200 that should return 410.
- Structured data validation
- Every template checked against the Rich Results Test, with markup describing content that is genuinely visible on the page and nothing that is not.
- A prioritised fix list, with effort estimates
- Each item states the likely impact, the effort, and who needs to do it — you, your developer, or us. Not a PDF export with severity colours.
Comparison
What a tool flags versus what actually matters
This is the table most agencies would rather you did not see, because a 4,000-error report justifies a bigger project than an eight-item one. Severity as reported by crawling tools, against real-world ranking impact.
| Tool finding | Reported as | Actual impact | Worth fixing? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta description missing | High | None on rankings; some on click-through | On commercial pages only |
| Multiple H1 tags | High | Negligible since 2019 | Only if the heading structure is genuinely confusing |
| Images missing alt text | Medium | Accessibility failure; minor SEO effect | Yes — for accessibility, not rankings |
| Redirect chains | Low | Wastes crawl budget, dilutes signals | Yes, and it is usually quick |
| Noindex on a key template | Often missed entirely | Severe — the page cannot rank at all | Immediately |
| Nav rendered client-side only | Rarely flagged | Severe — crawlers may never reach deep pages | Immediately |
| Soft 404s returning HTTP 200 | Medium | Wastes crawl budget on empty pages | Yes |
| Low text-to-HTML ratio | Medium | None. Not a ranking factor. | No |
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1
Crawl and collect
Full site crawl, Search Console export, log files where available, and CrUX field data. Log files are the single most useful source and the one most audits skip.
- 02Week 2
Diagnose
Separate the findings that affect rankings from the ones that only affect a tool score. Most audits fail at this step by reporting everything equally.
- 03Week 3–6
Fix
Implementation, by us or by your developers against our specification. Changes go to staging first and are verified after deployment, not assumed.
- 04Week 6–10
Verify and monitor
Re-crawl, watch index coverage move, and confirm the fix in field data. A technical fix that was never verified is a guess with an invoice attached.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- The prioritised fix list as a working document you keep, with impact and effort against each item.
- A developer-ready specification for anything we are not implementing ourselves.
- Before-and-after crawl data and field metrics, so the effect is evidenced rather than claimed.
- Monthly index coverage monitoring for the duration of the engagement.
- Full access to every tool account used, in your name.
Tools and platforms
- Screaming Frog
- Google Search Console
- Chrome DevTools & Lighthouse
- CrUX / PageSpeed Insights API
- Server log analysis
- Ahrefs or Semrush
- Schema.org validator & Rich Results Test
Timeline
How long this actually takes
The audit takes two weeks. Fixes take between two and six weeks depending on your development resource and how tangled the site is. Effects appear unevenly: indexation changes can show within days of a crawl, Core Web Vitals field data takes 28 days to reflect a change because it is a rolling average, and ranking movement from technical work usually shows across weeks four to twelve. Technical SEO is also the one area where the honest answer is sometimes that there is nothing much wrong — if your site is technically sound, we will say so rather than manufacture a project.
Pricing model
Fixed-price project
A standalone technical audit is a fixed-price project. Implementation is quoted separately once the findings are known, or included within an SEO retainer.
Questions
Technical SEO questions
My audit tool found 4,000 errors. Is my site broken?
Almost certainly not. Crawling tools report everything they can detect at roughly equal weight, and a single templating issue multiplied across 500 pages becomes 500 errors. Nearly every large audit collapses to somewhere between five and fifteen real problems. Working out which is the job; generating the list is not.
Does site speed actually affect rankings?
Yes, but less than most people assume and less than it affects conversion. Core Web Vitals are a genuine ranking signal and a weak one — they rarely outweigh relevance. Speed matters far more for the people already on your site than for the algorithm deciding whether to show it.
Our site is built in React. Is that a problem?
Only if it renders entirely in the browser. Google can execute JavaScript, but rendering is queued and deferred, so client-only sites index more slowly and less reliably. Server-side rendering or static generation removes the problem completely, and that is usually the recommendation rather than abandoning the framework.
What does "Crawled — currently not indexed" mean?
Google fetched the page, looked at it, and decided not to include it. That is a quality or duplication judgement rather than a technical fault, which is why technical fixes usually do nothing for it. The answer is normally thin, near-duplicate or low-demand content — the diagnosis is different and so is the cure.
Should we submit an XML sitemap for every page?
Submit every page you want indexed and nothing else. A sitemap containing noindex URLs, redirects or 404s is a contradictory signal and reduces trust in the file. Split large sitemaps by content type so index coverage reports become diagnostic rather than one undifferentiated number.
Can you work with our in-house developers?
Frequently, and it is often the cheaper route. The Nexclick supplies specifications precise enough to be picked up in a sprint — the exact change, the reason, the acceptance criteria — then verifies after deployment. What we will not do is hand over a spreadsheet and call it implementation.
How often does technical SEO need redoing?
A full audit annually is usually enough on a stable site. What matters more is checking after every significant change — a redesign, a plugin, a platform update, a new template. Most technical problems arrive with a deployment, not with an algorithm update.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.