The problem technical SEO solves
Technical SEO is the work of making sure search engines can find, render, understand and index the pages you want them to, and ignore the ones you do not. When it is neglected, good content and strong links underperform for reasons that never show up in a keyword tool: Googlebot spends its crawl budget on filter URLs, canonical tags point at the wrong versions, key content is injected by JavaScript after the initial render, or a migration left thousands of redirect chains behind.
These problems are invisible from the browser and easy to miss in a standard SEO report, which is why they persist for years. Fixing them rarely requires new content. It requires an accurate diagnosis, a clear specification and a development team that can ship it.
What technical SEO covers
The scope is everything between a search engine’s crawler and your page’s content. That includes crawl budget and crawl paths, robots.txt and meta robots directives, XML sitemaps, canonicalization, duplicate content, redirects, site architecture and internal link depth, JavaScript rendering, page speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data, hreflang for multi-market sites and the way status codes are served. On a small brochure site most of this is a one-time check. On a site with hundreds of thousands of URLs it is an ongoing discipline that needs monitoring, because every release can introduce a regression.
Who needs a technical SEO specialist
Technical SEO delivers the most value for sites where scale or complexity creates risk: e-commerce catalogues with faceted navigation, marketplaces and listing sites, SaaS products built on JavaScript frameworks such as React, Next.js or Vue, publishers with large archives, and any business about to migrate domains, platforms or site structures. If your site has fewer than a hundred pages on a standard CMS, a one-off audit is usually enough and we will say so.
What Axoria does
Crawl and indexation analysis
We crawl the full site, compare the results to Search Console’s index coverage report and identify every URL that is crawlable but should not be, indexed but should not be, or important but unreachable.
Canonicalization and duplicate content
Parameter handling, trailing-slash and case variants, HTTP/HTTPS and www duplicates, paginated series, faceted URLs and near-duplicate product variants resolved with canonical tags, noindex rules or consolidation.
Site architecture
Category hierarchy, click depth, hub pages, breadcrumbs and internal link flow redesigned so that priority pages sit close to the homepage and receive the most internal authority.
JavaScript SEO
We test what Googlebot sees before and after rendering, identify content, links and metadata that depend on client-side execution, and recommend server-side rendering, pre-rendering or hydration changes where needed.
Core Web Vitals and speed
Field data (CrUX) and lab data reviewed by template. Fixes target LCP through image and server response optimization, INP through JavaScript execution, and CLS through layout reservation.
Structured data
Product, Article, Organization, BreadcrumbList, FAQ and other schema types implemented in JSON-LD, validated, and limited to what is visible on the page and eligible for rich results.
The technical SEO audit: how we diagnose
An audit is only useful if it tells a developer what to change and tells a marketing lead why it matters. Ours starts by building three views of the site and reconciling them: what a crawler (Screaming Frog, rendered with JavaScript) can reach from the homepage, what Google reports in Search Console’s index coverage and sitemap reports, and, for larger sites, what server logs show Googlebot actually requesting. Pages that appear in one view but not the others are where the problems are.
For example, on a Shopify store with 3,000 SKUs, faceted navigation typically generates tens of thousands of colour, size and price-filter URLs. The crawler finds them, the logs show Googlebot requesting them repeatedly, and Search Console lists them as “crawled, currently not indexed”. Meanwhile new product pages take weeks to be discovered. The fix is a combination of robots.txt disallow rules for filter parameters, canonical tags on the remaining variants and an XML sitemap limited to canonical, indexable URLs with accurate lastmod dates.
How we prioritize fixes
Every finding is scored on two axes: how much organic performance it is likely costing and how much development effort it takes to resolve. Indexation problems on revenue pages come first because they block everything else. Redirect chains from an old migration are cheap to fix and usually next. Core Web Vitals work is scheduled by template, starting with the templates that carry the most organic traffic, because a 200-millisecond LCP improvement on the product page template is worth more than a perfect score on the careers page.
| Issue type | Typical symptom | Usual resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Crawl budget waste | New pages slow to index; logs show bots on parameter URLs | Robots.txt rules, parameter handling, sitemap cleanup |
| Canonical conflicts | Google chooses a different canonical than declared | Consistent self-referencing canonicals, matching internal links and sitemap entries |
| Client-side rendering | Content visible in browser, missing in rendered HTML test | SSR, static generation or pre-rendering for critical templates |
| Redirect chains and loops | Slow crawl, lost link equity post-migration | Flatten to single 301 hops, update internal links to final URLs |
| Poor Core Web Vitals | “Needs improvement” or “Poor” in Search Console by template | Image formats and sizing, script deferral, font loading, layout reservation |
Site migrations without losing rankings
Domain changes, replatforms and redesigns are the single most common cause of sudden organic decline we see. We run migrations as a project: benchmark current rankings and traffic by URL, build a full redirect map from old to new URLs (one hop, matched by intent rather than by pattern alone), preserve titles, canonicals, hreflang and structured data on the new templates, and stage a crawl of the new site before launch. After go-live we monitor Search Console daily for coverage errors and crawl anomalies for the first month.
Expert note: robots.txt is not an indexation tool
Blocking a URL in robots.txt stops Google from crawling it but not from indexing it if links point there. To remove pages from the index they need to be crawlable and carry a noindex directive, or return a 404 or 410. We see this confusion cause “indexed, though blocked by robots.txt” warnings on almost every large site we audit.
Our technical SEO process
Access and benchmarking
Search Console, GA4, CMS and (where available) server log access. We record current indexation, traffic by template and Core Web Vitals status as the baseline.
Full technical audit
Crawl, index reconciliation, log analysis, rendering tests, speed review, structured data validation, redirect and status-code review, and architecture mapping.
Prioritized specification
Findings become tickets in your issue tracker with the problem, the evidence, the exact change required and acceptance criteria a developer can test against.
Implementation support
We answer developer questions, review staging environments and validate each fix before it goes live, so nothing is deployed on assumption.
Monitoring and regression checks
Scheduled crawls, Search Console alerts and Core Web Vitals tracking catch regressions introduced by later releases.
Tools we typically work with
Screaming Frog for crawling and rendered-HTML comparison, Google Search Console for index coverage and Core Web Vitals field data, PageSpeed Insights and Chrome DevTools for lab diagnostics, server log files analysed directly or through a log analyser, Ahrefs or Semrush for site-wide issue monitoring, and Google’s Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator for structured data. We work inside your existing ticketing system, whether that is Jira, Linear, GitHub or something else.
How technical SEO results are measured
The primary measures are indexation health (the ratio of indexed pages to pages you want indexed, and the elimination of coverage errors), crawl efficiency (share of Googlebot requests hitting canonical, indexable URLs), time-to-index for new pages, Core Web Vitals pass rates by template, and, ultimately, organic sessions and conversions on the pages affected. For migrations we measure recovery against the pre-launch benchmark by URL group. We report these alongside the broader organic metrics covered in our SEO services and connect them to revenue through analytics and tracking.
What to expect
Technical work depends on development capacity, and that is usually the constraint. We specify fixes precisely so they can be estimated and scheduled like any other engineering task. Some changes, such as a canonical correction on a template, take an hour and show in Search Console within weeks. Others, such as moving a React storefront to server-side rendering, are multi-sprint projects. We will tell you which is which and what each is likely worth.
Technical SEO removes limits; it does not create demand on its own. Once the foundation is sound, growth comes from on-page optimization, content and authority. Our SEO guide explains how the pieces fit together.