Technical SEO is the work of making sure search engines can find, crawl, render, index, and understand your site. It covers site speed, crawlability, indexing rules, structured data, site architecture, redirects, and the many ways a site can accidentally hide its own pages from Google. It is the foundation the rest of SEO sits on.
Unlike content or link building, technical SEO is mostly diagnostic. The provider finds problems and specifies fixes; someone (often your developer) implements them. That split is where many engagements go wrong, so this page spends as much time on how to scope the handoff as on what the audit covers.
What technical SEO is
A search engine has to do four things with a page before it can rank it: discover the URL, crawl it, render it (run any JavaScript), and index it. Technical SEO removes the obstacles at each step and then makes sure the site sends clear signals about which pages matter, how they relate, and what they are about.
Typical problem areas include duplicate URLs, blocked or noindexed pages that should be visible, slow pages that fail Core Web Vitals thresholds, broken redirect chains after a migration, JavaScript that hides content from crawlers, thin or orphaned pages, and missing or incorrect structured data.
What a good engagement includes
Some providers also implement the fixes, either directly in your CMS or by working in your codebase. Ask whether that is in scope, since audit-only and audit-plus-implementation are very different prices.
- A full crawl of the site with a professional crawler, compared against what Google Search Console reports as indexed.
- Review of robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, noindex rules, hreflang (if you have multiple languages or regions), and pagination.
- Core Web Vitals and page speed assessment using field data (real users) as well as lab tests, with fixes prioritized by page template rather than page by page.
- Site architecture and internal linking review: how many clicks important pages are from the homepage, and whether authority flows to them.
- Structured data validation and recommendations tied to actual rich-result eligibility, not schema for its own sake.
- A prioritized findings document that separates critical, important, and minor issues, and states who should implement each one and roughly how much effort it takes.
- For migrations or redesigns: a pre-launch checklist, a redirect map, and post-launch monitoring.
What it should not include
- An automated tool export presented as the audit. Tools are inputs; the deliverable is the analysis and prioritization.
- A list of every warning the crawler found with no ranking of impact. Two hundred "missing alt text" items are not a strategy.
- Schema markup applied everywhere regardless of whether it makes any page eligible for a rich result.
- Ongoing monthly retainers with no defined recurring work. Technical health monitoring is a real service, but it is lightweight and should be priced that way.
- Fixes that are risky to the live site without a staging environment, testing, and a rollback plan.
How it is usually priced
Technical SEO is usually a project. Larger or more complex sites cost more because the crawl, analysis, and specification take longer. A monitoring add-on is sometimes offered after the initial project.
| Engagement | Illustrative range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Technical audit, small site (under 500 pages) | $1,500 to $5,000 | Findings and recommendations only |
| Technical audit, mid-size site or e-commerce | $5,000 to $20,000 | Includes template-level speed work and crawl analysis |
| Audit plus implementation | Audit price plus hourly or fixed dev fees | Confirm who owns the code changes |
| Site migration support | $3,000 to $25,000+ | Scales with URL count and platform change |
| Ongoing monitoring | $300 to $1,500 per month | Should be light-touch: alerts, monthly crawl, fix triage |
How to measure it
- Indexed page count in Search Console moving toward the set of pages you actually want indexed (not simply up).
- Crawl errors, redirect chains, and duplicate URLs falling after fixes ship.
- Core Web Vitals field data (in Search Console and Chrome UX Report) moving into the "good" range for your key templates.
- A fix log: which recommendations were implemented, when, and what changed afterward. Without this, the audit was a document, not a result.
- Organic traffic and rankings on the pages that were previously blocked, slow, or buried.
When you need it and when you do not
Technical SEO is worth buying when traffic dropped after a redesign or migration, when Search Console shows many pages excluded or "discovered, not indexed," when your site is large or built on a JavaScript framework, or before a migration you have not yet done.
You probably do not need a full technical audit if your site is small, on a well-maintained platform, and already indexing cleanly. In that case a short health check or the DIY checklist covers most of the ground, and money is better spent on content.
Bay Area context
Many Bay Area companies are software businesses with engineering teams and custom or headless stacks. That is good news for implementation, but it means the provider must be able to write recommendations engineers respect: precise, reproducible, and tied to a measurable outcome. Ask for a sample findings document before you sign.
It also means you should decide up front whether the provider works in your codebase or hands off tickets. Engineering time is expensive here, so a clear, well-prioritized specification is often worth more than a provider who insists on doing the implementation.
Questions to ask any provider
- Can I see a redacted sample of a past technical audit, including how issues were prioritized?
- Which crawler and data sources do you use, and do you compare crawl results against Search Console?
- Is implementation in scope? If not, how do you hand off to my developers?
- How do you prioritize findings, and do you estimate implementation effort for each?
- For Core Web Vitals, do you use field data or only lab tests?
- How do you test changes before they go live, and what is the rollback plan?
- What does ongoing monitoring include, and how is it priced separately from the audit?
- Have you worked on my platform or framework before? What were the common issues?
Warning signs
- The audit is a PDF export from a crawling tool with the provider's logo on it.
- Every issue is marked high priority, or nothing is prioritized at all.
- They promise ranking gains from technical fixes alone on a site with no content problems and no crawl problems.
- They want to make live changes without a staging environment.
- The engagement is a large open-ended monthly retainer for a site that just needs a project.
Technical SEO: common questions
Is technical SEO a one-time project or ongoing?
Mostly a project. The initial audit and fix cycle is the bulk of the work. After that, a light monitoring arrangement or a periodic re-audit is reasonable, especially if your site changes often. Be wary of a heavy retainer for what is essentially monitoring.
Do I need a technical audit before buying content or links?
Often yes, at least a short one. Content on a site that cannot be crawled or indexed is wasted, and a quick health check is inexpensive relative to a content program. A full audit is not always necessary; ask the provider to size the check to the site.
What is the difference between technical SEO and web development?
Developers build and maintain the site; technical SEO evaluates whether what is built can be discovered, crawled, and ranked, and specifies changes. Some providers do both. If yours does not, make sure the handoff between them is defined in the contract.
Do Core Web Vitals really matter for rankings?
They are a confirmed but modest ranking signal, and a larger factor in whether visitors stay. Fixing them is worthwhile, but a provider who presents speed work as the main lever for ranking gains is overselling it.
How do I know the fixes were actually implemented?
Ask for a fix log that maps each recommendation to a date and a verification (a re-crawl, a Search Console change, a speed test). If the provider does not offer one, keep your own.