Technical SEO Consultant

Technical SEO consulting is for websites where good content, links, or brand demand are being held back by the way the site is built. Josh Willett audits and fixes the crawlability, indexation, rendering, speed, schema, and site architecture problems that stop Google from understanding a website properly.

This work suits B2B, ecommerce, SaaS, and professional services websites that have outgrown basic SEO checks. Josh brings 8+ years of SEO experience, a former front-end developer background in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and direct technical delivery without account managers or junior handoffs.

Technical SEO Services Covered on This Page

Use this page to check whether the problem you are seeing is technical, and whether Josh is the right technical SEO consultant to diagnose it. The main areas covered are:

• Technical SEO audits and prioritised developer recommendations
• Crawlability, crawl budget, indexation, canonical tags, noindex rules, and redirect chains
• Core Web Vitals, Interaction to Next Paint, page speed, and HTTPS issues
• JavaScript SEO for React, Vue, Angular, Next.js, and other modern frameworks
• Schema markup, structured data, international SEO, hreflang, and site architecture
• Traffic drop investigations, migration checks, and Google penalty support

What Does a Technical SEO Consultant Do?

A technical SEO consultant finds and fixes the website infrastructure problems that affect how search engines crawl, render, index, and rank pages. That includes crawl paths, internal links, duplicate URLs, schema markup, server responses, JavaScript rendering, mobile performance, and the signals Google Search Console reports about the site.

If you want the wider definition first, Josh has a separate guide on what is technical SEO. This service page is more commercial: it explains the work, the deliverables, and the situations where hiring a specialist makes more sense than asking a general SEO consultant to run another tool export.

The best technical work is not a list of 200 issues. It is a prioritised action plan that tells your team what to fix first, what can wait, and what should be left alone because the risk outweighs the benefit.

When Technical SEO Is the Right Problem to Solve

Technical SEO matters when the site has a structural limit. A content plan will not solve pages that Google cannot crawl. Link building will not fix a canonical conflict. A redesign will not recover rankings if the new JavaScript framework hides core content from crawlers.

The common signs are easy to recognise:

• Important pages are discovered but not indexed in Google Search Console
• Organic traffic drops after a migration, redesign, CMS change, or URL restructure
• Core Web Vitals reports show failing LCP, CLS, or INP scores across key templates
• Google indexes duplicate, filtered, paginated, or parameter URLs instead of the page you want ranking
• Search engines see different content from users because of JavaScript rendering issues

These problems often sit under years of normal website growth. The work is closer to civil engineering than copywriting: inspect the structure, find the load-bearing faults, then fix the sequence that creates the largest performance gain with the least disruption.

Technical SEO Audit and Developer-Ready Recommendations

Most technical SEO consulting engagements start with a site audit. Josh combines crawl data, Google Search Console, server responses, rendered HTML checks, manual template review, and developer-level inspection to identify the technical issues that are most likely to affect organic performance.

The audit output is designed for implementation, not theatre. Your team gets clear explanations, affected URL examples, severity, commercial impact, and the specific fix required. For teams that want a self-check before commissioning an audit, Josh also maintains a technical SEO audit checklist.

Crawlability and crawl budget

Crawl analysis shows which URLs search engines can reach, which URLs waste crawl budget, and where internal linking blocks important pages from being discovered. For larger sites, Josh can use Screaming Frog exports, custom Python processing, and log file analysis to compare crawler behaviour against the site architecture.

Indexation, canonical tags, and duplicate URLs

Indexation checks identify pages that should be indexed but are not, plus pages that are indexed but should not be. Canonical tags, noindex rules, XML sitemaps, redirect chains, and duplicate URL patterns are reviewed together because they often create one combined signal problem.

For this site, the old root-level `/technical-seo-consultant/` URL should stay consolidated into the canonical `/services/technical-seo-consultant/` URL with a 301 redirect, and internal links should point at the canonical service page. That prevents ranking signals being split between two URLs targeting the same keyword.

Technical SEO Services Josh Provides

The scope depends on the site, but the work usually sits across eight areas. Each one connects a technical fix to a commercial outcome: more pages indexed, better rankings, fewer wasted crawls, faster templates, cleaner search appearance, or safer launches.

Core Web Vitals and page speed

Josh reviews Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Interaction to Next Paint, render-blocking resources, image delivery, caching, third-party scripts, and template-level performance. Core Web Vitals work is most useful when it is tied to the templates that drive revenue, not only the homepage score.

JavaScript SEO and rendering

React, Vue, Angular, Next.js, and similar frameworks can create a gap between what users see and what crawlers receive in the initial HTML. Josh checks raw HTML, rendered HTML, URL Inspection output, structured data, internal links, and metadata to see whether important content depends too heavily on client-side rendering.

Structured data and schema markup

Schema markup helps search engines understand entities, services, products, FAQs, reviews, organisations, and articles. Josh audits existing structured data, removes invalid markup, and specifies JSON-LD that supports the page rather than adding schema for the sake of it.

International SEO and hreflang

International technical SEO covers hreflang, language targeting, country targeting, canonical alignment, translated URL structures, and return tags. If your site serves multiple countries or languages, international SEO consulting prevents Google from ranking the wrong version in the wrong market.

Internal linking and site architecture

Internal linking determines how authority flows through the site. Josh reviews navigation, breadcrumbs, hub pages, URL structure, orphan pages, crawl depth, and template links to make sure commercial pages receive enough internal support. Larger ecommerce SEO and enterprise SEO projects often need this before content production can work properly.

Security, HTTPS, and server responses

Technical SEO also includes the basic signals that make a site reliable: HTTPS status, mixed content, redirect handling, 404 and 5xx errors, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, and response codes. These checks are not glamorous, but they are often where ranking and crawl problems begin.

Traffic Drops, Migrations, and Google Penalty Investigations

A sudden traffic drop needs diagnosis before action. Josh investigates whether the cause is technical, algorithmic, seasonal, content-related, tracking-related, or caused by a migration. Guessing at fixes can make the recovery slower.

Traffic drop work usually compares Google Search Console data, affected templates, URL history, redirect maps, crawl changes, indexation patterns, keyword losses, and recent releases. For migration or redesign projects, the priority is to protect existing search equity before the new site goes live.

Google penalty investigations require a different level of caution. Manual actions, spam signals, thin content, unnatural links, hacked content, and indexation shocks all need evidence-led handling. Josh will say when a problem is not technical, because misdiagnosis wastes budget and developer time.

Why Work With a Specialist Technical SEO Consultant?

Technical SEO is where many agency models break down. The strategy is sold by a senior person, but the technical audit is often assembled from automated exports and passed back to the client without enough implementation detail. Developers then receive vague tickets that do not explain the problem properly.

Josh works differently:

• Direct access to the person doing the audit and writing the recommendations
• Technical depth from a coding background, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, crawl tooling, and structured data
• No long-term contracts, so the work has to justify continued investment
• Clear prioritisation, with the highest-impact fixes separated from low-value noise
• Commercial judgement, so technical changes are connected to rankings, traffic, leads, and revenue

This is useful when you already have developers, content resource, or an in-house marketing team, but need senior technical SEO judgement to tell everyone what matters and in what order.

How the Consulting Process Works

The process is structured, but it is not a fixed package. A 200-page professional services site, a JavaScript SaaS site, and a 100,000-URL ecommerce site need different levels of crawl analysis, log file analysis, template review, and implementation support.

1. Diagnose the technical constraint

Josh reviews the site, search data, crawl data, and implementation context. The goal is to find the constraint that is most likely to be suppressing organic performance.

2. Prioritise the fixes

Each recommendation is ranked by likely impact, implementation difficulty, and risk. A simple canonical fix on a high-value template may matter more than dozens of low-impact warnings from an audit tool.

3. Support implementation

Josh can work with your developers, agency, or in-house team to clarify requirements, review staging changes, and check live implementation after release. He does not need to push code directly to your live site to be useful.

4. Verify the outcome

After changes go live, Josh checks crawl behaviour, indexation, Search Console signals, page performance, and ranking movement. Technical SEO is not complete until the fix has been verified.

Proof That Technical SEO Can Move the Numbers

Technical SEO is valuable because it compounds. Once the foundations are fixed, future content and authority work can perform better because search engines can reach, understand, and rank the right pages.

Relevant proof includes a 578% increase in organic clicks for Half Double Institute within 6 months, where technical SEO improvements contributed to crawlability and indexation gains. Josh has also helped Adaptivity reach the No. 1 position across Europe, showing how technical, content, and authority work can combine when the site foundations are sound.

The same principle applies on smaller projects. If Google is crawling the wrong URLs, ignoring important templates, or struggling with rendering, fixing that issue can produce more value than writing another batch of pages.

What to Look For When Hiring a Technical SEO Consultant

A good technical SEO consultant should be able to explain technical problems in language that both marketers and developers can use. The consultant does not need to be your developer, but they do need to understand enough about the codebase to avoid weak recommendations.

Before hiring, ask:

• Can they show how they prioritise technical issues by impact rather than severity labels from a tool?
• Do they understand JavaScript rendering, Core Web Vitals, schema markup, canonical tags, noindex rules, and redirects beyond surface-level definitions?
• Will they work directly with your developers and review implementation after release?
• Can they connect each recommendation to likely ranking, traffic, or revenue impact?

If the answer is mostly audit templates and vague promises, keep looking. Technical SEO is too close to your website infrastructure for unclear advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a technical SEO do?

A technical SEO finds and fixes the website infrastructure problems that affect crawling, rendering, indexing, structured data, page speed, and site architecture. The work helps search engines reach the right pages, understand the content, and rank the site without technical signals getting in the way.

What does an SEO consultant do differently?

An SEO consultant usually covers strategy, content, technical SEO, links, reporting, and commercial prioritisation. A technical SEO consultant goes deeper into the website itself, including crawl data, indexation, JavaScript rendering, Core Web Vitals, server responses, and developer recommendations.

Is SEO dead or evolving in 2026?

SEO is evolving, not dead. Google still needs crawlable, indexable, fast, useful pages. AI search makes technical SEO more important because content, structured data, and metadata need to be easy for both traditional crawlers and AI systems to parse from the page.

Do you work with JavaScript frameworks like React or Next.js?

Yes. Josh reviews JavaScript-heavy sites by comparing raw HTML, rendered HTML, URL Inspection output, internal links, metadata, schema, and template behaviour. The recommendation might be server-side rendering, static generation, hydration changes, routing fixes, or targeted changes to how content is exposed.

How long does a technical SEO audit take?

A focused audit can take a few days. Larger ecommerce, international, or JavaScript-heavy sites can take longer because the work needs crawl segmentation, template review, Search Console analysis, and sometimes log file analysis. The timescale should match the risk and complexity of the site.

Request a Technical SEO Audit

If your site is ranking below where it should, losing traffic after a release, or carrying technical debt that your team has not had time to untangle, request an audit. Josh will review the site, identify the likely constraint, and explain what needs fixing before you commit to a larger engagement.

Get in touch with the URL, CMS or framework, and the problem you are seeing. The next step is a practical assessment, not a sales pitch.