▲ Now tracking visibility across Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini & AI Overviews
Technical SEO is the work that makes every other lever pull. Crawl, render, index, perform. Get it right and your content gets the credit it deserves. Get it wrong and the best site in your category sits invisible on page four.
Before a search engine can rank a page, it has to find it, fetch it, render it, understand it, and decide it’s worth indexing. Every step is a chance to break things, and most sites break at least one.
Technical SEO is the discipline of making sure those steps work. Not just for Googlebot, but for Bingbot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and every other crawler now scraping the web to feed an AI model. A site that’s hard to crawl is a site that’s hard to cite.
It’s also the work most agencies skip past. Content briefs are easier to bill. Link building is easier to demo. Technical takes a senior strategist, a developer’s mindset, and the patience to fix things you can’t see on the surface. We’ve been doing it for fifteen years.
This page is a primer, not a pitch. Read it, run the self-audit below, and if you want a hand, we’ll do a free 30-minute walk-through.
01
Search engines have a budget for your site. Wasted crawl on broken links, infinite filters or duplicate URLs is wasted ranking opportunity. Server log analysis tells you where the budget actually goes.
02
Modern sites are JavaScript-heavy. If your content only appears after JS executes, you’re relying on a render queue that’s slower, smaller and less complete than HTML parsing. We test what Googlebot actually sees, not what your browser does.
03
Being crawled doesn’t mean being indexed. Canonical tags, noindex directives, duplicate content, low-quality pages, every one is a reason a page can be picked up and put down again. Index hygiene is half the battle.
04
Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal, but more importantly, they’re a conversion signal. LCP, INP and CLS measurements directly correlate to bounce, scroll-depth and revenue per visit. The fastest fix is almost never JavaScript.
Three signs: your impressions are growing but clicks are flat (CTR or SERP-feature issue), your top pages show ‘Crawled, currently not indexed’ or ‘Discovered, currently not indexed’ in Search Console, or your Core Web Vitals report has a ‘Poor’ bucket. Any one of those means yes.
Both. A site audit is a project, a 4 to 8 week piece of work to fix the foundations. Then it becomes ongoing maintenance, because every new release, CMS update or migration can re-introduce issues. Most clients run a quarterly technical health check after the initial sweep.
AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) follow most of the same rules, robots.txt, sitemaps, HTML parsing. But they care more about structured data, entity clarity, and quotable passage structure. We treat AI crawler accessibility as a first-class part of technical SEO, not an afterthought.
Site speed is one part of technical SEO. The broader discipline includes crawl, render, index, schema, canonicals, sitemaps, hreflang, redirects and a dozen other things. Speed matters, but a fast site that can’t be crawled or indexed is still invisible.
Both. We’re senior strategists with engineering backgrounds. We can either give your dev team a prioritised fix list with implementation notes, or we can implement directly into Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Next.js or whatever stack you’re on. Most clients use a mix.
The same scorecard our senior strategists run before quoting work. Weighted across technical, content, link and commercial signals. Tells you which fixes actually move rankings, not just the ones that look busy.
A 60-point self-audit. Score your site the way our senior team does.
Paperstack · 2026
16pp
Score yourself with the workbook, then book a free 30-minute call. We’ll review your scores live, prioritise the three highest-leverage fixes, and tell you which to ship first.
No spam. Unsubscribe in one click. We’ll never share your email.
