Content strategy fails when the technical foundation is broken. You can brief brilliant content, build strong backlinks, and optimise every title tag — and still watch pages fail to rank because Google can’t properly crawl, index, or understand the site. Technical SEO is where most agencies cut corners. It requires the ability to read a crawl report, understand how a site’s architecture affects indexation, and translate issues into specs that developers can actually implement.
What a technical SEO engagement covers
Crawl and indexation
- Full Screaming Frog crawl of the site
- Crawl budget analysis — are important pages being crawled? Are unimportant pages wasting budget?
- Index coverage review in Google Search Console
- Orphaned page identification
- Duplicate content and canonical tag review
URL structure and redirects
- Redirect chain analysis and 404 identification
- URL structure assessment
- Migration redirect planning where applicable
On-page technical
- Title tag and meta description review at scale
- H1 audit, image alt tag coverage, canonical implementation
- Robots meta tag review
Structured data / schema
- Schema audit — what’s present, what’s missing, what’s incorrect
- Implementation specs for LocalBusiness, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, and FAQ schema
Page speed and Core Web Vitals
- PageSpeed Insights assessment (desktop and mobile)
- LCP, CLS, and INP review
- Image compression and format recommendations
- Priority speed improvements
What you receive
Every technical SEO engagement produces a prioritised issues list ranked by SEO impact, implementation specs for each issue in plain language your developer can act on, a schema implementation guide, a Core Web Vitals action plan, and an executive summary of findings and recommended next steps.
Pricing
- Standard technical audit: R15,000–R25,000 — sites up to 10,000 pages
- Enterprise technical audit: R35,000–R50,000 — large eCommerce sites, complex architecture
- Technical SEO retainer add-on: +R4,000–R6,000/month alongside an SEO retainer
Book a discovery call → If the answer to “when did you last audit your technical SEO?” is “never” or “more than a year ago” — there are almost certainly issues affecting your rankings that you don’t know about.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO makes your site easy for Google to crawl, index, and trust — covering speed, mobile performance, site structure, and structured data.
What issues does technical SEO fix?
Slow load times, mobile problems, crawl and indexation errors, broken structure, duplicate content, and missing schema.
How do I know if I need technical SEO?
If your content is good but rankings lag, technical issues are usually why. An audit pinpoints exactly what’s holding the site back.
How quickly will it make a difference?
Once fixes are implemented, improvements often appear within a few weeks as Google re-crawls the site.