What technical SEO actually covers
Technical SEO is everything that determines whether search engines can find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It has nothing to do with keyword density. It has everything to do with how your site is built.
When technical SEO issues go unaddressed, your content does not rank regardless of how good it is. Pages get crawled but not indexed. Schema markup is missing or malformed. Core Web Vitals fail on mobile. Redirect chains bleed link equity. These are solvable problems. They are just much easier to solve before launch than after.
What Webbington audits and fixes
As a technical SEO specialist, Matt audits every site against a 15-point checklist before any content strategy is discussed. Here is what that covers:
- ✓ Crawlability: robots.txt, sitemap, noindex tags, crawl budget
- ✓ Indexation: canonical tags, duplicate content, URL parameters
- ✓ Core Web Vitals: LCP, CLS, INP across all page templates
- ✓ Schema markup: Organisation, WebPage, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Service
- ✓ Redirect management: 301 chains, 302 misuse, broken links
- ✓ Internal link graph: orphan pages, link equity flow, anchor text distribution
- ✓ Page speed: image optimisation, render-blocking resources, server response time
- ✓ Mobile usability: tap target sizing, viewport configuration, font scaling
- ✓ HTTPS and security headers
- ✓ Structured data validation via Google's Rich Results Test
Why fixing technical SEO issues after launch is harder
Once a site is live, every technical change carries risk. Changing URL structures breaks backlinks. Restructuring the CMS breaks templates. Fixing redirect chains requires careful mapping to avoid losing indexed pages. None of this is impossible, but all of it takes longer and costs more than getting it right the first time.
When Webbington builds a site, technical SEO is not a checklist item at the end of the project. It is the foundation the site is built on. Schema types are planned before the CMS is scaffolded. Core Web Vitals budgets are set before design decisions are made. Redirect maps are built before migration starts. The result is a site that launches clean and stays clean.
Technical SEO as part of the build, not a separate engagement
Many companies hire a web developer and a technical SEO specialist separately. The developer builds what looks good. The SEO specialist asks for changes. Nobody owns the outcome. At Webbington, one team is accountable for both. If your pages are not indexing or converting, that is our problem to fix, not yours to manage.
Technical SEO services are included in every Build Sprint and maintained as part of the Growth Retainer. There is no separate technical SEO retainer. It is part of the system.
