Technical SEO Services That Remove the Ceiling

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the work of making sure search engines can reach, read and index every page that earns you money, and that those pages load fast for real visitors. It covers robots.txt (the file that tells crawlers where they may go), status codes, redirects, canonical tags (which tell Google the main version of a duplicated page), rendering, Core Web Vitals and structured data. Great content can’t rank on a page Google never indexed. That’s the ceiling.

We come at it as engineers. Our founder, Colin Ma, has a computer science degree from UC Irvine and has shipped technical SEO for Toyota and Lexus. Python scripts we wrote pull our Search Console data. We read the raw exports behind the dashboards.

Our Technical SEO Process

Our technical SEO process runs in a fixed order. Each step asks one question about the pages that bring in revenue, and a later step doesn’t start while an earlier one is failing. Speeding up an unindexed page wastes money.

What We Fix First, and What We Skip

We fix whatever stops Google from indexing a revenue page first, because nothing else on the list can pay off until that’s solved. Next comes speed on the templates with the most traffic. Schema and polish come last.

We skip work that only sounds thorough. Crawl budget analysis is a large-site problem that gets sold to small sites. For a single-location dental practice, we left it out, along with image alt text, because neither would move the map pack. Our San Diego dental SEO case study walks through what we did instead.

Search Console Data We Don’t Take at Face Value

We don’t trust a Search Console report until we know how it was pulled, because some of its defaults hide real traffic. It can list one URL twice, with and without a trailing slash, as separate rows. A careless merge can keep the smaller row. We’ve caught a high-traffic page reported with a few dozen impressions. The tell is a tiny impression count at a near-perfect position.

Adding a country filter to a page-level pull silently drops clicks from anonymized queries. Long-tail articles can look dead when they aren’t. And old URLs keep appearing in performance reports for months after a 301 redirect. It looks like cannibalization, two of your pages competing for one search, but the old URL is only a reporting leftover.

We Test on Our Own Sites

We test on our own sites, starting with a scheduled weekly audit of matchagrowth.com that crawls every URL in its sitemap. Between July 24 and October 16, 2026, that produced 12 dated audit runs.

On one of our WordPress sites, we updated 197 pages through the API, but the Rank Math sitemap kept their 2022 to 2024 lastmod dates (the last-updated date a sitemap reports for each URL). Stale dates can slow Google’s recrawl. Re-saving the sitemap settings rebuilds the file. Host page caches also serve stale HTML, so we check every edit against the origin server with a cache-buster.

Technical SEO FAQs

Short answers to common technical SEO questions.

Does a small business need to worry about crawl budget?

Most small businesses don’t need to worry about crawl budget. It’s the number of URLs Google will crawl on your site in a given period. Small sites rarely hit it. It only becomes a constraint on very large sites, like big catalogs with filter pages. On a local service site or a store with a few hundred products, we look at why specific pages aren’t indexed instead.

Should I block a page with robots.txt or noindex?

To keep a page out of Google’s results, use a noindex tag rather than a robots.txt block. Google has to crawl a page to see its noindex tag, and a URL blocked in robots.txt can still be indexed from links pointing at it. Robots.txt controls crawling. Google itself calls it an honor system. To keep a bot off your server, use a firewall rule.

Should a deleted page return a 404 or a 410?

A deleted page should return a 410 when you know it’s gone for good, and a 404 when you aren’t sure. RFC 9110, the 2022 HTTP standard, says a 410 tells recipients the removal is likely permanent and that the owners want links to it removed. If the server can’t tell, the standard says 404 “ought to be used instead”. If a close replacement exists, we 301-redirect.

Do you make the fixes or just hand over an audit?

We make the fixes where we have access, and hand the rest to your developer as tickets. On WordPress we can ship changes ourselves. We check each one on the live page, because a plugin can strip what the API reported as saved. Where your team owns the code, every ticket carries the evidence, the fix and acceptance criteria your developer can test against, and we verify the result after release.

Is technical SEO a one-time project?

Technical SEO runs as an ongoing monthly retainer with us, with no setup fee. The first weeks go to the audit and the fixes that unblock revenue pages. Then we keep watching. Theme updates, plugins and new templates keep introducing problems on sites that were clean, so we review Search Console and Core Web Vitals every month.