Technical SEO

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics Google uses to measure real user experience: how quickly your page becomes usable, how stable the layout is while it loads, and how responsive it feels when someone interacts with it. Slow, janky pages create a worse experience, and Google factors that into rankings, particularly in close competitive matchups.

For small business sites, the most common culprits are unoptimized images, bloated page builder plugins, too many third-party scripts (chat widgets, tracking pixels, review widgets all loading at once), and cheap or oversold hosting. Fixing this usually does not mean rebuilding your site. It means finding and removing the specific things slowing it down.

Before anything else can rank, a page has to be crawled and indexed. We check for common blockers: an accidentally misconfigured robots.txt file, a stray noindex tag left over from a staging site, orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them, and crawl budget wasted on low-value pages like filtered or parameterized URLs that multiply endlessly on e-commerce sites in particular.

We also fix redirect chains and canonical issues, which happen when a site has moved, been redesigned, or changed URL structures over time without cleaning up after itself. A page that redirects three or four times before landing, or two pages competing for the same keyword because neither has a canonical tag pointing to the other, both quietly dilute your rankings.

Structured data, or schema markup, is a standardized way of labeling content so search engines understand exactly what it represents: a product, a review, a local business, a frequently asked question, an event. It is what enables rich results like star ratings, price ranges, or FAQ dropdowns to appear directly in search results.

It is worth being clear about what schema does not do. Adding structured data does not directly boost your rankings on its own, and no legitimate provider should promise that it will. What it does is make your existing content eligible for richer, more clickable search results, which can meaningfully improve your click-through rate even at the same ranking position.

How your pages are organized and linked to each other affects both how search engines understand your site and how they distribute authority across it. A flat, logical structure where important pages are just a click or two from the homepage tends to perform better than a deep, disorganized one where key pages are buried.

Internal linking is one of the most underused levers small businesses have, because it is entirely within your control and costs nothing to fix. Linking from your highest-authority pages to the pages you most want to rank, using descriptive anchor text, is a direct way to pass along ranking signal you are already generating elsewhere on your own site.

Sites built on WordPress often accumulate plugin bloat over years, with multiple tools doing overlapping jobs and each adding its own scripts and stylesheets. Sites on platforms like Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace have less flexibility to fix certain technical issues directly, which means the fixes have to work within what the platform allows.

Platform migrations, whether a full replatform or a routine redesign, are one of the most common sources of technical debt. URL structures change, old pages get orphaned or lost, and redirects are often handled hastily or not at all. If your traffic dropped around the time of a redesign or migration, that is almost always the first place to look.

Google predominantly uses the mobile version of your site, not the desktop version, to determine rankings, even for searches performed on a desktop computer. This means if your mobile site hides content, has different navigation, or renders differently than your desktop site, the mobile version is effectively the one that counts.

For small business sites this often surfaces as tap targets that are too small or close together, text that is too small to read without zooming, or content that gets cut off or hidden behind accordions and tabs in a way that limits how much of it search engines give weight to. We check the mobile experience directly rather than assuming a responsive design automatically solves this.

Sites built with heavy JavaScript frameworks can look perfectly normal to a visitor while being difficult for search engines to fully render and understand, particularly if important content or links only appear after client-side scripts run. This is an increasingly common issue as more small business sites move to modern page builders and app-like frameworks without accounting for how that affects crawlability.

We check whether your content and links are actually visible in what search engines render, not just what a browser shows a human visitor, and identify where server-side rendering or static generation would meaningfully improve how your site gets indexed.

A valid, properly configured HTTPS certificate has been a baseline expectation for years, and its absence, or mixed content that loads some resources over an insecure connection, is treated as a trust issue by both browsers and search engines. We check for this along with more subtle issues, like certificates that are correctly installed on the main domain but missing on subdomains.

This category also includes making sure your site is not compromising crawl efficiency by accidentally serving both HTTP and HTTPS versions of the same pages as separate, indexable URLs, which splits ranking signal between two versions of what should be one page.

Not every technical fix is available on every platform, and part of doing this work well is knowing the difference upfront rather than recommending changes that are simply impossible to make. On a custom-coded site, nearly everything is fixable directly. On WordPress, most fixes are achievable through a combination of configuration, careful plugin choices, and, when necessary, direct code changes.

On hosted platforms like Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace, some technical decisions, like URL structure or certain redirect behaviors, are controlled by the platform itself and cannot be changed no matter who is doing the work. In those cases, we focus on what is actually achievable within the platform: theme-level performance improvements, structured data the platform allows you to add, and site architecture decisions you do control, like collection and navigation structure, rather than promising fixes the platform will not permit.

For larger or higher-traffic sites, we also look at crawl budget more directly, meaning how search engines allocate their limited crawling activity across your site, and identify where that budget is being wasted on low-value pages instead of the pages you actually want indexed and updated quickly.

Technical SEO is not something you fix once and leave alone. A plugin update can silently reintroduce a slowdown that was already solved. A developer adding a new page template can accidentally skip the canonical tag every other template includes. A CDN or hosting change can affect how quickly pages load in ways that never show up until Core Web Vitals data catches it weeks later.

We set up ongoing monitoring for the issues most likely to recur: crawl errors and coverage problems in Search Console, Core Web Vitals scores over time, and spot checks after any significant site change, whether that is a redesign, a new plugin, or a platform update, so a new problem gets caught in days rather than discovered by accident months later when rankings have already slipped.