Technical SEO

The short version

Technical SEO is the work that determines whether Google can find, crawl, render and index your pages efficiently — and whether the pages it does index load fast enough to compete. It is the first thing we do on every engagement because content and links cannot compensate for a site that is wasting crawl budget on parameter URLs or shipping a 4-second Largest Contentful Paint. A full technical pass takes two to four weeks; the fixes take longer and usually need your developers.

Last reviewed September 11, 2025

## What a technical pass actually covers

– **Crawl and index control.** What Google is spending its budget on versus what you want indexed. Parameter handling, pagination, faceted navigation, soft 404s, and the long tail of URLs no one knew existed.
– **Rendering.** Whether your JavaScript-dependent content is in the DOM Google sees. On React, Vue and Next.js sites this is where a surprising amount of invisible traffic loss lives.
– **Core Web Vitals.** LCP, INP and CLS measured on real user data from the Chrome UX Report, not on a lab score. A green Lighthouse run on your laptop tells you very little about a visitor on mobile in Ohio.
– **Internal linking.** Which pages receive internal authority and which are orphaned. On most sites over a few hundred pages this is the single highest-leverage technical fix available.
– **Structured data.** Organization, Product, Article, FAQ, Breadcrumb — implemented as a connected graph rather than scattered blocks. This matters twice over now: for rich results and for whether AI systems can resolve your site as an entity.
– **Log-file analysis.** On sites over roughly 10,000 URLs, server logs tell you what Googlebot is really doing, which routinely contradicts what the crawl tools predicted.
– **Migrations.** Domain, platform or structure. Priced as a fixed project, because it is a month of concentrated work.

## How we sequence it

[steps]
[step title=”Baseline and crawl” when=”Week 1″]Full crawl, Search Console export, CrUX data, and where available a week of server logs. Nothing is changed yet.[/step]
[step title=”Prioritised findings” when=”Week 2″]Not a 300-item tool export. A ranked list: what is costing traffic now, what will cost traffic later, and what the tool flagged that genuinely does not matter.[/step]
[step title=”Implementation” when=”Weeks 3–8″]We implement what we can access directly and write developer-ready tickets for the rest — with the reasoning, so your engineers can push back on it rather than guess.[/step]
[step title=”Verification” when=”Ongoing”]Every fix is re-checked after deployment. A ticket marked done that did not actually ship is the most common source of “we did all that and nothing happened”.[/step]
[/steps]

Two weeks for a site under about 5,000 URLs, three to four weeks for larger or JavaScript-heavy sites where rendering and log analysis are involved. Implementation runs longer and depends on your development capacity — that is usually the constraint, not our side.

If you want us to, and you grant access, yes — for CMS-level and template-level work. For application code we write specification-level tickets your engineers implement, because pushing changes to a codebase we do not own is a bad idea for both of us.

Probably. Lighthouse is a lab test on one page on your machine. Core Web Vitals are assessed on field data from real Chrome users across your whole site. A 95 lab score and failing field data is one of the most common patterns we see.

Internal linking that leaves commercially important pages three or four clicks from the homepage while thin pages sit in the main navigation. It is unglamorous, it is free to fix, and it moves rankings more reliably than most things that cost money.

How this page was written. Researched and drafted by the RankMont strategy team, reviewed by a named editor before publication, and fact-checked against primary sources — Google Search Central documentation, Google’s Search Status Dashboard, and the named studies cited beside each figure. We use AI tools for research and first drafts, as every serious agency now does; nothing is published without a human rewriting it and an editor signing off. The full editorial and AI-use policy is at /editorial-policy/. Last reviewed 11 September 2025.