Technical SEO: the fixes that let your content rank
Technical SEO is the work of making sure Google and the AI crawlers can reach, read and trust your website. It does not write a word of copy, but when it is wrong, none of the copy ranks. Phoenix Marketing does this work for businesses across Sussex as part of every SEO programme, and as a standalone audit when a site has a problem.
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What technical SEO actually covers
Access, speed, structure and signals. Can search engines crawl and index every page that should be indexed, and none that should not? Does the site load quickly and stay stable on a phone (Google’s Core Web Vitals)? Is the structure logical, with clean URLs, working internal links, one canonical version of each page and no redirect chains? And does the site carry the structured data that lets Google show rich results and lets AI assistants understand what the business is?
What it looked like for a client
For Dolphins Optometrists we took the site to a 92 per cent site health score with zero technical errors, alongside a brand refresh and content work. That clean foundation is part of why the practice now ranks 47 keywords in Google’s top three and is cited 23 times across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. For UK Turnstiles, the first phase of a three phase programme was a full technical audit: crawl and indexation fixes, Core Web Vitals improvements, Product, Organisation and FAQ schema, and tighter internal linking, before any content work began. Read the Dolphins case study or the UK Turnstiles case study.
What we check in a technical audit
- Crawling and indexing: robots rules, sitemaps, noindex tags, canonical tags, crawl errors in Search Console
- Core Web Vitals and page speed on mobile and desktop
- Site structure: URL hygiene, internal links, orphan pages, redirect chains, duplicate content
- Structured data: what is present, what is invalid, what is missing
- AI crawler access: which of GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot are allowed, and whether that matches what you want (see our guide to AI crawler management)
- Security and hygiene: HTTPS, mixed content, broken links, image weight
What you get
A prioritised list, not a 90 page PDF. Every issue is graded by impact and effort, with the fix written so your developer can act on it, or we make the fixes ourselves on WordPress sites. We re-crawl after the work and send the before and after. Technical SEO is included in our SEO service and our hosting and maintenance plans; it can also be bought on its own.
Frequently asked questions
How is technical SEO different from normal SEO?
Normal SEO is mostly content and links. Technical SEO is the plumbing underneath: whether search engines can reach, render and understand the site. Both are needed; technical work on its own will not rank a site with weak content, and strong content on a broken site will not rank either.
Do I need a technical audit if my site is new?
Usually yes. New builds are where we find the most problems: staging pages left indexable, missing redirects from the old site, no structured data, images that slow the mobile experience. A short audit at launch is far cheaper than a recovery later.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Google’s three measures of page experience: how fast the main content loads, how quickly the page responds to input, and how stable the layout is while loading. They are a confirmed ranking signal and they affect whether visitors stay.
Can you fix the issues, or only report them?
Both. On WordPress sites we make the fixes ourselves. On other platforms we write each fix so your developer can implement it, and we verify afterwards.
Ask us for a technical SEO audit
A friendly 15 minute call, no obligation.
or call 01444 523105