Technical SEO Services: Crawling, Speed, Schema and Structure

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the plumbing. It's everything that determines whether a search engine or AI crawler can reach your pages, read what's on them, understand how they relate, and serve them to people quickly. It's not glamorous and clients rarely notice it when it works. They notice when it doesn't, usually as a traffic drop after a redesign.

It matters more, not less, with AI search. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode can only use pages that are indexed and eligible to appear as a snippet. (source) ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest can only cite pages their crawlers successfully fetched. If a page isn't reachable, it doesn't exist to any of them.

What does technical SEO cover?

Crawling: can bots reach your pages?

• robots.txt: not blocking important sections, CSS or JavaScript files, and not blocking AI search bots by accident. A surprising number of sites block everything through a security plugin or CDN bot-fight setting.
• XML sitemap: listing only live, indexable, canonical URLs, and submitted in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Server health: fast responses, no 5xx errors under load, no firewall rules quietly rejecting legitimate crawlers.
• Crawl waste: filter and search URLs, calendar pages and session parameters that create thousands of near-identical URLs.

Indexing: are the right pages in the index?

• Pages that should rank are indexed. Pages that shouldn't (thank-you pages, internal search, staging copies) aren't.
• Canonical tags pointing to the right version, so ?utm= variants and duplicate paths don't split signals.
• No stray noindex left over from a staging site. This is the most common post-launch disaster we see.
• No nosnippet or restrictive max-snippet on pages you want quoted in AI Overviews.
• Duplicate and near-duplicate pages consolidated. Google's AI search guide specifically recommends reducing duplicate content.

Rendering: can bots see your content?

If your main content, navigation links or product details only appear after JavaScript runs, some crawlers will see an empty page. We compare the raw HTML to the rendered page and make sure the important parts are in both. Tabs and accordions are fine as long as the content is in the HTML.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google measures real-user experience with three Core Web Vitals, assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads:

The usual culprits on small-business sites: oversized hero images and videos, too many third-party scripts (chat widgets, multiple analytics tags, heatmaps), web fonts loaded late, and sliders. The fixes are usually unexciting: compress and resize images, lazy-load below the fold, remove scripts nobody uses, and reserve space for elements that load late.

Mobile usability

Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Text readable without zooming, tap targets with enough space, no content hidden on mobile that exists on desktop, and no intrusive pop-ups covering the page on arrival.

Structured data

Structured data (schema.org markup, usually in JSON-LD) labels what's on a page in a machine-readable way. It isn't required for Google's AI features and there's no special AI schema, but it clarifies who you are and qualifies you for rich results. The useful set for most businesses:

• Organization or LocalBusiness (with the right subtype) on the home or contact page
• Service or Product on offering pages, with Offer details for e-commerce
• Article with author details on blog posts
• BreadcrumbList sitewide
• Event, Recipe, Course or JobPosting where they apply

We validate everything with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator, and make sure markup matches what's visible on the page. Markup that describes things users can't see is a policy problem.

Site architecture and internal linking

• Important pages reachable within a few clicks of the home page
• Clear hub pages (like a service pillar) linking down to detail pages and back up
• Descriptive link text ("local SEO checklist", not "click here")
• No orphan pages that nothing links to
• Short, readable, stable URLs

Good architecture tells search engines which pages matter most and what topics you cover deeply. It's also how topical depth becomes visible to a crawler.

Redirects and migrations

Every redesign, platform move or URL change needs a redirect map: each old URL pointing with a 301 to its closest new equivalent. Skipping this step is how sites lose years of rankings in a weekend. We build and test redirect maps before launch, not after.

Security and hygiene

HTTPS everywhere with no mixed content, no redirect chains, no soft 404s (error pages returning a 200 status), and a sensible 404 page.

What about llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed file, introduced in 2024, that gives AI tools a Markdown map of your site's important content. (source) Google's AI search guide says you don't need it for Google's AI features. Chrome's Lighthouse tool added an llms.txt check in its agentic browsing audits in 2026, aimed at AI agents navigating sites, not at search rankings.

Our view: it takes very little time and does no harm, so we'll add one when it's useful for agents. We won't tell you it's the reason you'll show up in AI answers.

How we run technical SEO

1. Crawl and diagnose. A full crawl, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools data, Core Web Vitals field data, and server logs where available.
2. Prioritize by impact. Indexing blockers first, then anything affecting your money pages, then sitewide hygiene.
3. Fix or brief. We implement, or hand your developer exact tickets with acceptance criteria.
4. Verify. Re-crawl, re-test and confirm in Search Console that the fixes took.
5. Monitor. Alerts for new errors, indexing drops and Core Web Vitals regressions.

What good looks like

• Every page you care about is indexed, canonical and eligible for snippets
• Search and AI search bots reach your site without errors
• Core Web Vitals pass on mobile for your key templates
• Structured data validates and matches the page
• No orphan pages, redirect chains or leftover noindex tags

Technical SEO is the foundation of our SEO, AEO and GEO engagement. The SEO audit is where we find out what needs fixing. If your site needs a rebuild rather than repairs, see Webflow development.