Crawling the wrong URLs
Filter and parameter URLs getting crawled by the thousand while the pages you care about wait their turn. On a small brochure site this rarely matters. On a big catalogue with faceted navigation, it can.
Technical SEO Freelancer
The crawl data doesn't lie. Let's see what yours says.
Technical SEO is where all my work starts. Before I suggest a word of new content or chase a single link, I crawl your whole site in Screaming Frog and go through your Search Console data, so every fix I recommend is tied to a real URL on your site.
Where I start
Why every job begins with a crawl
It isn't because technical problems are always the biggest thing holding a site back. Often they're not. But a full crawl is the fastest way for me to get to know a site properly: how it's built, which pages exist that everyone has forgotten about, and where Google is actually spending its time.
Sites that have been through a couple of developers, a platform move or years of bolted on changes nearly always have something hiding in them. A crawl finds it. Guessing doesn't.
Common findings
What I find most often
None of these are exotic. They're just easy to miss when nobody has looked at the whole site in one go.
Orphaned pages
Pages that exist, and might even be in your sitemap, but nothing on the site links to them. Google can still find them. It just has very little reason to think they matter.
Canonical mix ups
Canonical tags pointing at the wrong version of a page, or at a URL that redirects somewhere else. Each one quietly tells Google to look elsewhere.
Redirect chains
Internal links that bounce through two or three redirects before they land. Google can follow them. They're still slower for visitors and a pain to maintain, so I point links straight at the final URL.
Robots and noindex mistakes
Whole sections blocked in robots.txt that should be crawled. And the opposite: thin or duplicate pages left wide open when they shouldn't be in the index at all.
Pages Google won't index
Important URLs sat in Search Console as crawled but not indexed. The cause varies (duplication, thin content, rendering problems), so I check each one properly instead of guessing.
Prioritising
A list of 400 warnings isn't an audit
Crawl tools are brilliant at producing warnings, and most of those warnings don't matter. I rank everything I find by impact, confidence and effort. A broken canonical on your highest traffic page gets sorted before a speed tweak on a page nobody visits.
Every recommendation names the exact URL, the exact change and what we should expect to see once it's done. If I can't explain why something matters to your traffic or your sales, it doesn't make the list.
Core Web Vitals get the same treatment. I look at your real user data first and compare it with Google's own thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 seconds or under, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or under, Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or under. What I won't do is chase a green Lighthouse score while half your catalogue is churning out thin duplicate pages.
What's included
What you get from a technical audit
- A full Screaming Frog crawl, with custom extraction where your site needs it
- A Search Console review of indexing and coverage
- Site architecture and internal linking review
- Canonical, redirect and status code checks
- robots.txt and XML sitemap checks
- Core Web Vitals review using real user data and PageSpeed Insights
- Crawl waste analysis for large and faceted sites
- A prioritised fix list: the URL, the change and what to expect for every item
Platforms
Written for the platform you're on
I work on Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and custom builds, and the same problem gets fixed in a completely different way on each one. So you won't get a generic checklist. You'll get fixes written for your platform, in a form your developer (or you) can act on.
Technical work is usually where a bigger project starts, not where it ends. If you want the wider picture (content, backlinks and competitors as well), the full SEO audit covers all of it. And with the niche fashion retailer on my homepage, the work included rebuilding the technical foundation, fixing cannibalisation across category pages, rolling out product schema and building new content. It was averaging around 1,400 organic visits a day when I took it on, and over seven years it has peaked at 12,500.
What do you use for a technical SEO audit?
Screaming Frog for the crawl, Google Search Console for indexing and performance data, Ahrefs for backlinks and keyword context, and PageSpeed Insights for Core Web Vitals. The crawl and the Search Console review always come first, before I write any strategy.
How quickly do technical fixes show results?
It depends on what's broken. Removing something that's stopping pages being indexed can show up within weeks. Bigger structural work, like cleaning up architecture or internal links, usually takes a few months to come through. I'll tell you which camp your fixes fall into before we start.
Want to know what a crawl would find on your site?
Tell me a bit about your site and I'll come back within 24 hours with an honest view of whether technical work is the right place to start.
Book a Free Consultation