Technical SEO · Core Web Vitals · Site Architecture

The Technical Foundation That Makes Your SEO Actually Work.

Crawlability audits, Core Web Vitals optimisation, site architecture review, schema markup and log file analysis. The infrastructure work that determines whether Google can find, index and rank every page you create.

53%
Of users abandon pages that take over 3 seconds to load
Foundation
Without which content and links underperform

Technical SEO is the work that happens before content ranks and links pay off. If Googlebot cannot crawl your pages, cannot index them efficiently or encounters slow load times and broken signals, no amount of content investment will hit its potential. Koldconvert technical SEO audits identify every issue holding your site back and deliver a prioritised fix list with specific remediation steps, not vague recommendations.

53%
Abandon pages slow over 3 seconds
CWV
Google ranking signal since 2021
Prioritised
Fix list by impact, not alphabetical
Definition

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the discipline of optimising the infrastructure of a website so that search engines can crawl, index and rank its pages efficiently and correctly. It is distinct from content SEO (what pages say) and off-page SEO (who links to them). Technical SEO covers site speed and Core Web Vitals, crawlability and crawl budget, indexability and canonical signals, URL structure and site architecture, schema markup and structured data, mobile usability, hreflang for multilingual sites and server-level issues such as redirect chains and log file anomalies. A site with poor technical foundations will underperform in search regardless of content quality or domain authority, because search engines cannot reliably access or correctly evaluate what it contains.

What We Cover

The Full Technical SEO Surface Area

Crawlability and Indexability

Full site crawl to identify blocked pages, noindex tags, robots.txt conflicts, sitemap issues and orphaned URLs. Every page that should be indexed, verified against GSC.

Core Web Vitals

LCP, INP and CLS measured across all key page templates using field data and lab testing. Specific fixes for render-blocking resources, image loading, layout shift and server response time.

Site Architecture and Internal Linking

URL structure review, silo and hub-and-spoke architecture audit, internal link equity distribution and crawl depth analysis. Ensuring every important page is reachable efficiently.

Schema Markup and Structured Data

Audit and implementation of Organisation, BreadcrumbList, Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Product, Service and WebPage schema. Validation against Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org specification.

Duplicate Content and Canonicalisation

Identification of duplicate, near-duplicate and thin content. Canonical tag audit, parameter handling, pagination review and rel=alternate configuration for multilingual sites.

Log File Analysis

Server log analysis to understand how Googlebot actually crawls your site: which pages it visits, at what frequency, and where it encounters errors. Ground-truth data on crawl behaviour.

Diagnosis

Signs Your Site Has Technical SEO Problems

  • You publish new content but it takes weeks or months to appear in search results, or never appears at all, despite being indexed on older pages.
  • Google Search Console shows coverage errors, excluded pages or indexing issues that have not been investigated or resolved.
  • Your Core Web Vitals report in GSC shows pages failing LCP or CLS thresholds. You know the issue exists but have not identified the specific cause or fix.
  • You have invested in content and link building but organic traffic has plateaued or declined despite consistent effort. Technical issues are suppressing the performance of what you have built.
  • You migrated your site, changed CMS, restructured URLs or switched hosting provider in the last 12 months and have not conducted a full technical audit since.
Process

From Audit to Clean Technical Foundation

01

Full Crawl and Audit

Crawl the entire site with Screaming Frog and Sitebulb. Identify broken links, redirect chains, missing metadata, duplicate content, crawl errors and indexability issues across every URL.

02

Core Web Vitals and Performance

Test every key page template against CWV thresholds using Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights and field data from CrUX. Identify render-blocking resources, image optimisation gaps and TTFB issues.

03

Architecture and Schema

Review site architecture, internal linking, URL structure and sitemap configuration. Implement or correct schema markup for all relevant page types.

04

Fix, Verify and Monitor

Implement fixes with your development team, verify resolution in GSC and Screaming Frog, then set up ongoing monitoring for regressions and new issues as the site grows.

Our Approach

The Koldconvert Technical SEO Audit System

The Koldconvert Technical SEO Audit System treats technical issues not as a checklist to run through once, but as a root cause investigation into why specific pages are underperforming relative to their content quality and link equity. Most technical SEO audits produce a list of 200 issues ranked by severity with no context about which ones are actually causing ranking suppression. We prioritise by impact: which issues are preventing pages from being crawled, which are causing indexing failures, and which are reducing ranking potential for pages that are already in the index. The output is a fix list ordered by revenue impact, with specific implementation instructions for each issue that a developer can action without further research.

Koldconvert Perspective

Most B2B websites have at least three or four technical SEO issues that are silently suppressing organic performance. They are not dramatic failures, they are quiet ones: pages that are technically indexable but competing with near-duplicate versions of themselves, image files that are slowing LCP by two seconds on mobile, redirect chains that dilute link equity between high-value pages. These issues accumulate over years as sites grow, CMSs change and developers make structural decisions without SEO visibility. The difference between a site that grows organic traffic consistently and one that plateaus despite good content is almost always the quality of its technical foundation.

Koldconvert Search and AI Visibility Team

Deliverables

What You Receive

  • Full site crawl report with every technical issue identified, categorised by type and severity
  • Core Web Vitals analysis across key page templates with specific fix recommendations for each failing signal
  • Site architecture and internal linking review with visualisation and recommended structural changes
  • Schema markup audit with implemented corrections for all page types and Rich Results Test validation
  • GSC coverage and indexing issue resolution with verified before-and-after documentation
  • Prioritised fix list ordered by impact with developer-ready implementation instructions for each issue
Stack

Tools and Platforms We Work With

Crawlers
Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, DeepCrawl
Performance
Google Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, CrUX
Search Console
Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools
Keyword and Rank
Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz
Log File Analysis
Screaming Frog Log Analyser, Splunk, custom parsing
Schema
Google Rich Results Test, Schema.org validator, JSON-LD
Industries

Technical SEO Across B2B Sectors

SaaS and Software

SaaS sites frequently suffer from JavaScript rendering issues, dynamically generated URLs and thin feature pages that confuse Googlebot. Technical SEO for SaaS focuses on render budget, canonical signals across product variants and structured data for software applications.

Ecommerce

Ecommerce sites have the most complex technical SEO surface area: faceted navigation generating millions of parameter URLs, product canonicalisation, paginated category pages and structured data for Product, Offer and Review. Crawl budget management is critical at scale.

Professional Services

Professional services firms often have low page counts but high business value per ranking. Technical SEO focuses on local schema, service area pages, author schema for thought leadership content and ensuring thin service pages are consolidated or expanded rather than penalised.

Fintech

Fintech sites are YMYL (Your Money Your Life) pages where Google applies higher scrutiny. Technical SEO ensures author credentials are marked up correctly, content is fresh and accessible, and site security signals are strong including HTTPS, CSP headers and clean crawl signals.

HealthTech

HealthTech content is also YMYL and benefits significantly from medical schema, author and organisation markup, and structured content that makes clinical credentials machine-readable. Core Web Vitals performance is especially important for mobile users accessing health information.

Marketplace

Marketplace sites generate enormous amounts of user-created content and listings that require careful technical management. Thin listing pages, duplicate content across similar listings and crawl budget allocation between SEO-valuable and low-value pages are the primary technical challenges.

EdTech

EdTech sites with course catalogues need careful technical SEO around course schema (Course, EducationalOrganization), paginated catalogues, login-walled content and the separation between free educational content intended for search and paid course content that should not be indexed.

Legal

Legal sites compete in highly competitive YMYL search categories. Technical SEO focuses on attorney schema, practice area page architecture, local SEO signals for multi-location firms and ensuring that disclaimer and terms content does not dilute the relevance of fee-earning practice area pages.

Logistics and Supply Chain

Logistics companies with large service area footprints benefit from location-specific technical SEO: hreflang for multilingual European sites, local business schema for depot locations and structured service area pages that target specific trade corridors and freight categories.

PropTech and Real Estate

Property sites with listing inventories face the same crawl budget and duplicate content challenges as large ecommerce sites. Technical SEO for PropTech covers RealEstateListing schema, neighbourhood page architecture and the management of expired listing URLs that should return 410 rather than 404.

Comparison

Technical SEO Audit vs No Technical Foundation

Factor With Technical SEO Foundation Without Technical Foundation
Content performancePages rank to their potential given quality and linksQuality content suppressed by technical signal noise
IndexingNew pages indexed quickly and reliablyPages excluded, delayed or incorrectly indexed
Core Web VitalsPassing thresholds across all key templatesFailing signals applied as ranking disadvantage
Schema and rich resultsEligible for FAQs, HowTos, breadcrumbs in SERPsMissing structured data, no rich result eligibility
Crawl efficiencyGooglebot focused on valuable pagesCrawl budget wasted on redirect chains and thin URLs
Link equityFlows cleanly to target pages via internal linksDiluted through redirect chains and duplicate canonicals
Questions

Technical SEO, answered

Technical SEO is the practice of optimising the infrastructure of a website so that search engines can crawl, index and rank its pages efficiently. It covers site speed, crawlability, indexability, site architecture, schema markup, Core Web Vitals, hreflang for multilingual sites and log file analysis. Without a sound technical foundation, no amount of content or link building will reach its potential.

Core Web Vitals are Google's page experience signals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading speed, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability. Google uses these as ranking signals. Pages that pass Core Web Vitals thresholds rank better than equivalent pages that fail them, and they directly impact conversion rates and bounce rates.

Content SEO focuses on what your pages say: keyword targeting, content depth, topical authority and link acquisition. Technical SEO focuses on whether your pages can be found and evaluated by search engines at all. Both are required. Technical SEO is the foundation; content SEO is what you build on top of it.

A comprehensive technical SEO audit for a B2B website of 50 to 500 pages typically takes 1 to 2 weeks. This includes full crawl analysis, Core Web Vitals testing, log file analysis, schema audit, mobile usability review and a prioritised fix list. The report includes every issue, its impact severity and the specific fix required.

Crawl budget is the number of pages Googlebot will crawl on your site within a given period. For small B2B sites with under 1,000 pages, crawl budget is rarely critical. For larger sites with many thin, duplicate or redirect-heavy URLs, crawl budget management becomes important. Wasting crawl budget on low-value pages means high-value pages get crawled less frequently.

Engagement

How to Work With Us

One-Time Technical Audit

Full crawl, Core Web Vitals analysis, schema audit, architecture review and prioritised fix list. Delivered in 1 to 2 weeks. The complete picture of what is holding your site back technically.

Audit and Fix Sprint

Audit followed by a 4-week implementation sprint where we fix the highest-impact issues directly, working with your development team. Fixes verified in GSC before handover.

Ongoing Technical SEO Retainer

Monthly technical SEO monitoring, regression alerts, new issue identification and implementation support. For sites that deploy code changes frequently and need ongoing technical SEO oversight.

Key Terms

Technical SEO Glossary

Core Web Vitals (CWV)
Core Web Vitals are three page experience metrics used by Google as ranking signals: Largest Contentful Paint (loading speed of the main content element), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness to user input) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability during load). Google publishes field data for CWV in the Chrome User Experience Report and surface issues in Google Search Console.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the total number of pages Googlebot will crawl on a website within a given time period. It is determined by crawl rate limit (how fast Googlebot can crawl without overloading the server) and crawl demand (how often Googlebot wants to crawl based on page popularity and freshness signals). Efficient crawl budget management ensures Googlebot spends its allocation on high-value pages.
Canonical Tag
A canonical tag is an HTML element that tells search engines which version of a URL is the preferred one when multiple URLs contain similar or identical content. It is used to consolidate ranking signals from near-duplicate pages onto a single canonical URL and to prevent pagination, parameter and session ID URLs from creating duplicate content issues.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is structured data added to HTML in JSON-LD format that describes the content on a page to search engines in machine-readable terms. It enables rich results in SERPs (FAQs, breadcrumbs, How To steps, review stars) and helps search engines understand entity relationships, authorship and content type. Schema is also the primary mechanism for making content speakable for voice search and citeable by LLMs.
Hreflang
Hreflang is an HTML attribute that tells search engines which language and region variant of a page to serve to users in specific countries. It is used on multilingual websites to prevent country-specific pages from competing with each other in search results and to ensure users in each region see content appropriate to their language and locale.
Log File Analysis
Log file analysis is the examination of server access logs to understand how Googlebot actually crawls a website, as opposed to how it should crawl it based on configuration. Logs reveal which pages Googlebot visits, at what frequency, which return errors, and which are crawled disproportionately relative to their SEO value. It is the most reliable source of ground-truth data on crawl behaviour.

Ready to find out what is holding your site back technically?

Book a strategy call. We will scope the technical audit and tell you what we expect to find before we start.