Technical SEO Agency Leeds
Most SEO proposals are content plans with a technical section bolted on. This is the other way round. Technical SEO is the part of the job that is engineering — whether Google can crawl your site, whether it chooses to index what it crawls, how fast the page becomes usable, and whether your markup describes what is actually on the screen. We audit it, we tell you what is wrong in plain English, and then we fix it, because a report you cannot action is not a deliverable.
Crawlability
Crawl the site as Googlebot does, then compare it against robots.txt, sitemaps and your internal link graph.
Indexation
Duplicate homepages, parameter URLs and trailing-slash variants split ranking signals. We consolidate them.
Core Web Vitals
LCP, INP and CLS measured in the lab and against real CrUX field data — which is what Google actually uses.
JS rendering
What is in the initial HTML versus what appears after hydration. Content only JavaScript can see is a risk.
Structured data
Validated against Rich Results, and checked against what is actually visible on the page.
Fixes, not findings
We implement them in your codebase or at your CDN edge, and document anything that lives outside the repo.
A Real Before And After
Buttercup Children's Trust is a UK charity that funds equipment for seriously ill and disabled children. Their website scored **14 out of 100** on Google PageSpeed Insights for mobile. It also had a dead application-form PDF ranking in Google — 212 searches a quarter landing on a 404 — an `/index.html` duplicate of the homepage indexed separately, and HTTPS that was not enforced site-wide.
The rebuilt site scores **100**, loads in about 0.15 seconds, serves one canonical homepage, and 301s the dead PDF to the live application form.
That is one case study rather than a portfolio, and we would rather say so than pad it out. It is also exactly the shape of most technical SEO work: a small number of specific faults, each individually unglamorous, that together were costing a charity the people it exists to help.
What A Technical SEO Audit Actually Involves
Not a 200-point checklist generated by a tool. Here is the order we actually work in, and why.
**1. Can Google reach it?** We crawl the site the way Googlebot does and compare that against what is in your `robots.txt`, your sitemaps and your internal link graph. The most common finding is not a blocked page — it is a page nothing links to, which Google therefore visits rarely and ranks accordingly.
**2. Is it indexed, and is the right version indexed?** We pull the Index Coverage and page indexing reports from Google Search Console and inspect individual URLs against the live API. Duplicate homepages, parameter URLs, trailing-slash variants and staging subdomains all split ranking signals between URLs that should be one.
**3. How fast does it become usable?** We measure Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift — using both Lighthouse in the lab and CrUX field data from real visitors, because those two disagree more often than people expect. Field data is what Google actually uses.
**4. Does it work without JavaScript running perfectly?** If your site renders client-side, we check what is in the initial HTML versus what appears after hydration. Content that only exists after JavaScript executes is content Google may or may not see.
**5. Does the markup describe what is on the page?** We validate structured data and check it against the visible content. FAQ markup describing answers that are hidden behind a click is a common and entirely avoidable problem.
**6. Is the site telling search engines the truth about itself?** Canonicals, hreflang if you have it, HTTP status codes, redirect chains, and whether HTTPS is genuinely enforced rather than merely available.
The Tools, Named
Because "proprietary methodology" usually means a spreadsheet.
**Google Search Console** — Search Analytics, URL Inspection and the sitemaps API, read directly rather than through a dashboard that resamples it. This is the only source of truth for what Google actually did with your site.
**PageSpeed Insights and the CrUX API** — lab scores plus 28 days of real-user field data, including the 25-week history most tools do not surface.
**Lighthouse and Unlighthouse** — for auditing many pages at once rather than the one URL you happened to test.
**Chrome DevTools protocol** — for rendering comparisons, network dependency chains and layout-shift attribution.
**Cloudflare** — where a great deal of technical SEO is now actually fixed. Redirect rules, HTTPS enforcement, TLS versions, cache behaviour and Workers all live at the edge rather than in your codebase.
**Schema validation** against Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org, not just "does it parse".
We also run RankLift, our own tracking platform, but we are not going to pretend the tool is the skill.
Where Technical SEO Actually Moves The Needle
It is worth being honest about this, because plenty of agencies are not.
Technical SEO is the floor, not the lever. If Google cannot crawl your site, cannot decide which URL to index, or your pages take eight seconds to become usable, nothing else you do will work. Fixing that is necessary. It is rarely sufficient on its own.
Where it produces the largest measurable gains: sites with indexation problems, where hundreds of pages are simply missing from Google; sites where a migration or replatform broke redirects and lost accumulated authority; JavaScript-heavy sites where Google is not seeing the content; and sites with duplicate or near-duplicate URLs splitting signals between versions of the same page.
Where it will not save you: a well-built site in a competitive market with no independent links pointing at it. We will tell you that during the audit rather than after six months of invoices, because the alternative is selling you work that cannot succeed.
We Fix It, We Do Not Just Find It
The standard technical SEO deliverable is a PDF listing problems, handed to a developer who was not in the room and has their own backlog. Six months later most of it is still open.
We are a development company that does SEO, not the other way round, so the fixes are the deliverable. Redirect rules, schema blocks, template changes, image formats, render-blocking resources, sitemap generation, internal linking structure — we implement them, in your codebase or at your CDN edge, and we tell you exactly what changed and where.
One thing we insist on: when a fix lives at the CDN rather than in your repository — a Cloudflare redirect rule, for instance — we document it, because that fix will not travel with you if you ever move host. Undocumented edge configuration is one of the most common ways a site silently regresses a year later.
What It Costs
A standalone technical SEO audit with implemented fixes is a fixed-price project, scoped after a short look at the site and your Search Console data. We will tell you the number before you commit to anything, and if we do not think the work is worth doing we will say that instead.
Ongoing technical SEO is included in our Grow (£399/mo), Lead (£699/mo) and Dominate (£1,100/mo) plans, alongside content and local SEO.
What happens next: send us the URL. We will look at Search Console, run the crawl and the field-data checks, and come back with the three or four things that are actually costing you rankings — ranked by what they are worth, not by what is easiest to bill for. That first look does not cost anything.
Related Insights
Common Questions
Six stages, in this order: crawling the site as Googlebot sees it and comparing that against robots.txt, sitemaps and internal links; checking indexation in Google Search Console including duplicate and parameter URLs; measuring Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) in both Lighthouse and real-user CrUX field data; comparing server-rendered HTML against post-JavaScript content; validating structured data against what is actually visible on the page; and checking canonicals, status codes, redirect chains and HTTPS enforcement. The output is a ranked list of fixes, and then we implement them.
Regular SEO is largely content and links — what your pages say and who vouches for them. Technical SEO is engineering: whether Google can crawl your site at all, whether it indexes the right URL, how quickly the page becomes usable, and whether your markup describes what is genuinely on screen. Technical SEO is the floor. It is necessary and it is rarely sufficient on its own, and any agency telling you otherwise is selling you something.
The audit itself is typically one to two weeks depending on site size. Implementation depends on what we find — a redirect rule and a schema fix land the same week, whereas rebuilding a render-blocking template takes longer. Technical fixes also show up faster than content work: indexation and speed improvements often move within days, where ranking gains from content take three to six months.
Largest Contentful Paint measures when the main content appears, Interaction to Next Paint measures how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks, and Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the page jumps about while loading. They are a genuine ranking signal, though a modest one — a fast site does not outrank a well-linked one. They matter far more for conversion than for rankings, which is usually the better argument for fixing them.
Yes, and most of our technical work is on sites built by somebody else. We work in your existing codebase where we have access, and at the CDN edge where we do not — a great deal of technical SEO is now fixable in Cloudflare without touching the application at all. We document anything implemented at the edge, because those fixes do not travel with you if you change host.
Yes. Technical SEO has no geographic component — the work is identical wherever the business is. We are based in Leeds and a lot of our clients are in West Yorkshire, but crawl budget and Core Web Vitals do not care where your office is.
Then we will tell you. The most common finding on a well-built site is that the constraint is independent links rather than anything on the site itself, and no amount of technical work fixes that. We would rather say so during the audit than take six months of fees for work that cannot succeed.
Send us the URL and we will tell you what is actually costing you rankings.
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