If Googlebot can't crawl your site, if your Core Web Vitals are red, if your schema markup is broken, or if AI crawlers can't execute your JavaScript — nothing else you do in SEO matters. Fix the plumbing first.
You can have the best content in your vertical, the strongest backlink profile, and the most complete Google Business Profile — and still not rank if your site has technical issues Google's crawler runs into. We regularly audit sites with rankings that should be top 3 but are stuck at position 15-25 for reasons the content team can't see: noindex tags left over from staging, canonical pointing to the wrong URL, orphan pages Google never finds, schema errors that disqualify from rich results, LCP over 4 seconds killing user signals.
Technical SEO is unsexy work that pays back massively. A single technical audit + fix cycle typically unlocks 20-40% ranking improvement on affected pages without touching content or backlinks. The reason: you were being penalized for issues Google's ranking system already documented, and fixing them removes the penalty.
Five steps from onboarding to first ranking win. Same for every client.
We run Screaming Frog + Sitebulb + PageSpeed Insights + Rich Results Test across your priority URLs. Document every issue with severity ranking.
Capture Core Web Vitals baseline via CrUX (real user data) and Lighthouse (lab data). Prioritize LCP fixes first — biggest ranking impact.
Install the full schema stack. Every page type gets appropriate markup. All validated in Rich Results Test before deploy.
Clear the crawl errors in GSC. Fix canonical issues. Submit updated sitemap. Kill orphan pages or link them in.
Weekly baseline snapshots. Alert if anything regresses (WP plugin update breaks schema, theme change kills a canonical, etc.).
Free 20-minute qualifying call. We look at your Google Search Console, your competition, and your goals — then tell you honestly whether this service moves the needle for you.
CALL (689) 209-3652 →Six questions specific to this service. Longer answers on the qualifying call.
Two options: (1) One-time technical audit + fix sprint at $2,500-$5,000 depending on site size (small local biz site vs multi-hundred-page publisher). (2) Included in retainer for ongoing clients — technical SEO is one of the six services in our monthly retainer, not billed separately.
Core Web Vitals are Google's three page-experience metrics: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — how fast the main content loads. INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — how responsive the page feels when you click things. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — how much stuff jumps around while loading. Google confirmed these are ranking factors. Sites in the "Good" threshold consistently outrank sites in the "Poor" threshold when other factors are equal.
For rich results in Google search (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, event cards, product listings), yes — schema is required. For classic ranking, schema is a modest positive signal, not a killer factor. For AI Overviews and voice search, schema is important because it gives Google structured facts to extract. Every business we work with gets baseline schema (LocalBusiness or similar) at minimum; vertical-specific schema on top of that.
Plugins like Yoast, RankMath, or AIOSEO handle about 60% of what technical SEO covers — meta tags, canonical, XML sitemap, some schema. They don't handle: crawl budget optimization, JavaScript rendering audits, Core Web Vitals performance work, or the deep schema stack needed for rich results. For a small local business a good plugin is enough for the basics. For anything more, you need real technical work.
Every time a WordPress plugin updates, a theme changes, or a developer edits a template, technical SEO signals can silently break. We've seen: schema disappear after a Yoast update, canonical URLs flip during a theme change, robots.txt reset by a caching plugin. Drift monitoring captures a weekly baseline snapshot and alerts you the moment something changes, so you can fix it before rankings drop.
Yes. WordPress-specific work — WP Rocket configuration, Elementor bloat reduction, image optimization (WebP conversion), font optimization, theme JavaScript deferral, database cleanup — is standard territory. We've moved sites from PageSpeed Mobile 20 → 93 in two sprints. If you're on Shopify, Webflow, or headless (Next.js, Astro, Gatsby), the tactics differ but the discipline is the same.
