Technical SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
Technical SEO for online stores, keeping your site crawlable and indexed.
An online store is a tricky technical case. Thousands of URLs, filters that add thousands more, variants that look alike, and a template that gets changed in one place and ripples through two hundred pages. We make sure Google crawls and indexes exactly the pages that are worth something, and leaves the rest alone.
The problem
Technical problems don't announce themselves. There's no alert, your rankings just slowly slide, and nobody can point to why.
- Filter and sort URLs multiply, and Google spends its crawl budget on pages you never wanted indexed.
- Product variants and sold-out items produce pages that compete with each other or sit dead in the index.
- Internal links follow the navigation instead of commercial priority, so your most important categories end up buried deep.
- A migration or theme change scrambles canonicals, redirects or pagination, and you only notice weeks later in your traffic.
The opportunity
Technical SEO is the part with the shortest turnaround. Content and authority take months, but fixing a crawl problem can show results within weeks, simply because pages that already existed finally count. It's also the part that touches your ads: in search campaigns, Google factors in the experience on your landing page, and that judgement counts towards Ad Rank. Speed, mobile behaviour and a clear structure work both ways.
Our approach
What we look at.
We crawl your store with Screaming Frog, put that next to Search Console and your log files, and work through the list in order of impact.
Crawling and indexing
Which pages Google is allowed to see and which not, managed through robots.txt, noindex and canonicals instead of hope. Filters and sorting get explicit treatment.
Site structure
A category structure that follows how customers search rather than how your warehouse is organised, with a click depth that keeps your most important pages close to the homepage.
Internal links
Steering link strength towards the categories that make you money, with breadcrumbs, blocks between related categories and links from blog content.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Load time, layout shift and responsiveness on mobile, measured with real visitor data rather than just a test score.
Structured data
Product, review and breadcrumb markup that matches what's actually on the page, so you're eligible for rich results without risking a manual action.
Migrations and releases
If your store moves to a new platform or theme, we build the redirect map in advance and check after launch that nothing was lost.
In the Growth System
Stage 04: the base the rest can build on.
Within organic work, technical is the first step, because content and authority don't render on pages Google can barely reach or understand. It also touches stage 03: your ad traffic uses the same landing pages that get faster and clearer here, and Google factors that experience into the auction.
View the full Growth System- 01 Measure
- 02 Discover
- 03 Attract
- 04 Get found
- 05 Scale
Frequently asked questions
What clients usually ask.
Missing a question? Email or call us, the lines are short here.
How do I know if my store has a technical problem?
Usually from the gap between what you've published and what's indexed. If you see hundreds of pages marked as excluded or crawled but not indexed in Search Console, that's a strong signal. We look at that together in the growth session.
Should my filter pages be in Google or not?
That depends on the search query. A filter people actually search for, like a size or a colour within a category, can make a perfectly good landing page. Filters that only produce combinations nobody searches for, we keep out of the index. It goes wrong when it happens by accident instead of on purpose.
Do you make the changes yourselves?
That varies. On Shopify, WooCommerce and most custom-built stores, we can do a lot ourselves; otherwise we hand over tickets with exactly enough detail for your developer to act on straight away. What we do and what your team does gets agreed in advance.
How quickly do I see something back?
Some things move fast, like pages that finally get indexed or internal links that shift strength around. Others, like a structural change, need time because Google has to crawl everything again. We tell you upfront which category a change falls into.
Is speed still a ranking factor?
Speed and the rest of the page experience play a role, but less heavily than often claimed, and relevance wins almost every time. The bigger win usually sits in your conversion rate and your ad costs, since a slow mobile page loses you customers you've already paid for.
A crawl tells you within an hour where your store gets stuck.
Bring access to your Search Console to the growth session, and we'll show you which pages Google actually sees and which ones it skips.
Reply within 24 hours on working days