Technical SEO is everything that affects whether search engines can find, render, understand and trust your pages, as opposed to what the pages say. When it goes wrong, it quietly cancels out good content and good links. We see the same patterns on Brighton websites again and again, from five-page WordPress brochure sites to start-up web apps and shops with thousands of products.
Who it is for
- Tech and software companies around the station and across the city whose marketing sites are built with JavaScript frameworks.
- Online shops with filters, variants and seasonal collections that create duplicate or orphaned pages.
- Hotels and restaurants whose booking widgets, sliders and large images make mobile pages slow.
- Any business after a redesign that lost traffic and doesn't know why.
- Agencies and studios who build sites for others and want an independent check before launch.
What a technical SEO audit covers
| Area | What we check |
|---|---|
| Crawling | robots.txt, internal links, orphan pages, redirect chains and loops, broken links, crawl traps from filters, search pages and calendars |
| Indexing | Search Console page indexing report, noindex tags, canonical tags, duplicate and thin pages, XML sitemaps |
| Rendering | Whether JavaScript-built content is visible to Google, lazy-loading, content hidden on mobile |
| Speed and Core Web Vitals | LCP, INP and CLS from real users, image weight, render-blocking scripts, third-party tags, hosting and caching |
| Site structure | URL patterns, navigation, internal linking, click depth of important pages |
| Structured data | LocalBusiness, Product, Article, Breadcrumb, FAQ and other schema, validity and accuracy |
| Security and hosting | HTTPS, mixed content, server errors, uptime |
| Multi-site set-ups | Subdomains, staging sites leaking into Google, hreflang for international sites |
How the work runs, step by step
- Access. We ask for Google Search Console and analytics access, and a staging site if you have one.
- Crawl. We crawl the whole site the way a search engine would, rendering JavaScript where needed.
- Compare. We match the crawl against what Search Console says Google has indexed, and against real-user speed data.
- Prioritise. Each issue is rated by impact and effort, with the number of pages affected.
- Explain. You get a short written report and a call to walk through it.
- Fix. We make the changes ourselves or write tickets for your developer.
- Verify. We check each fix is live and working, then watch Search Console for the effect.
What you won't get: a 300-row export from an SEO tool with every warning marked "critical". Most tools flag things that don't matter. We tell you which five or ten issues are actually holding the site back.
Common technical problems on Brighton websites
- Single-page apps where key pages render only in the browser and are slow to index.
- Heavy hospitality sites that load a booking engine, video and image slider before any text, giving a poor mobile experience for visitors searching on the seafront.
- Shops with filtered collections creating thousands of near-identical URLs that waste Google's attention.
- Old redesigns where previous URLs were never redirected, so years of links point at 404 pages.
- Staging sites left open, competing with the live site in search results.
- Every page with the same title, set by a theme or plugin and never changed.
What to ask before hiring for technical SEO
Brighton has plenty of SEO agencies and freelancers, and most will offer an audit. Before choosing one, it is worth asking a few plain questions. Will the audit be prioritised, or is it a tool export? Who makes the fixes, and do they know your platform? How will they confirm each change worked? Will they look at real-user speed data from Chrome, or only lab scores? A good answer to each tells you more than any sales deck.
It also helps to be clear about what technical SEO cannot do. It removes obstacles. It does not make a thin page useful or earn links on its own. On most small business sites, a few weeks of technical work clears the way, and then the bigger gains come from content and authority. If someone proposes months of purely technical work on a 20-page site, ask why.
Platforms we work with
WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow and custom builds in frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt and plain static generators. On hosted builders we are limited to the settings the platform allows; we will tell you honestly when a limit is costing you.
How long it takes
An audit for a small business site usually takes one to two weeks. Larger shops and web apps take longer. Fixes can be quick, but Google then needs to recrawl the site, which can take from days to several weeks depending on its size and how often it is crawled. Indexing problems tend to show improvement first; speed and structure changes take longer to reflect in rankings.
What it costs, and what drives the cost
An audit is a fixed-price piece of work. The price depends on:
- Size of the site: a 30-page brochure site is very different from a 20,000-URL shop.
- Platform: custom JavaScript builds need rendering analysis; standard platforms are quicker to assess.
- Whether we implement: an audit-only report costs less than audit plus fixes.
- Urgency: diagnosing a sudden traffic drop involves more investigation than a routine health check.
We give you a fixed quote after the free first look, so there are no surprises.
Common mistakes when fixing technical SEO
- Chasing a perfect score in a speed tool rather than improving real-user data.
- Blocking pages in robots.txt to remove them from Google, which can stop Google seeing the noindex tag and leave them indexed.
- Adding canonical tags that point to the wrong page or conflict with redirects.
- Installing several SEO plugins at once that all output their own tags.
- Fixing everything at once, so nobody knows which change helped.
How we measure success
We track the number of valid indexed pages against the pages you want indexed, crawl errors, Core Web Vitals from real users, and impressions and clicks for the sections of the site we fixed. For shops and booking sites, we also look at conversion rate on mobile, because speed improvements often show up there before they show up in rankings.
Related services and reading
Technical work is usually the first step before content strategy and link building. If a redesign is coming, see website migrations. Many of the start-ups we work with are in central Brighton and the station quarter.