Technical SEO that removes what is holding your site back

Crawling, indexing, ranking — in that order

Search works as a pipeline. A page must be discoverable, then crawlable, then renderable, then indexable, before ranking is even a possibility. A break at any stage makes everything downstream irrelevant, which is why technical work comes before content work in almost every roadmap.

1. 01

   Discovery

   Google finds the URL through internal links, sitemaps or external links. Orphan pages with no internal links are frequently never discovered at all.

2. 02

   Crawling

   Googlebot fetches the URL. Robots.txt rules, server errors and slow responses all interfere here.

3. 03

   Rendering

   JavaScript executes and the final DOM is produced. Content that only appears after a click, or that depends on a failed API call, may never be seen.

4. 04

   Indexing

   Google decides whether the page is worth storing. Thin, duplicate or canonicalised pages get dropped here — visible in Search Console as excluded.

5. 05

   Ranking

   Only now do relevance, intent match, authority and page experience come into play.

Reading the Search Console indexing report properly

The Pages report in Google Search Console is the most under-used diagnostic in SEO. Each exclusion reason has a distinct cause and a distinct fix, and lumping them together is how sites stay broken for years.

Core Web Vitals, diagnosed at the cause

Lighthouse gives you a lab score on a simulated device. Google ranks on field data from real Chrome users. The two often disagree, and optimising for the lab number while field data stays poor is wasted effort.

• LCP — usually a slow server response, a render-blocking stylesheet, or a hero image that is unoptimised or lazy-loaded when it should not be
• CLS — almost always images and embeds without dimensions, late-injected banners, or web fonts swapping in at a different metric size
• INP — long JavaScript tasks blocking the main thread, frequently from tag managers and chat widgets rather than your own code
• TTFB — hosting, uncached dynamic rendering, or a database query on every request

JavaScript SEO

Modern frameworks are not inherently bad for SEO — badly configured ones are. The test is simple: fetch the page as a crawler and check whether the content, the internal links and the metadata are present in what comes back.

• Content that requires a click, tab or scroll event to load may never be indexed
• Internal links implemented as click handlers instead of anchor elements are invisible to crawlers
• Client-side-only routing can leave every URL serving the same initial HTML
• Metadata set purely on the client is often crawled in its unset, default state
• Server-side rendering or static generation removes almost all of these risks at once

Structured data, used honestly

Schema markup helps search engines interpret a page unambiguously, and can earn richer results. It cannot manufacture credibility. Marking up reviews you do not have, or FAQs that are not visible on the page, is a manual-action risk rather than a shortcut.

The rule followed on every site we work on: schema describes what a visitor can actually see. Nothing more.