Grow / Technical SEO
Crawl, index, architecture, internal links, performance, schema and migration risk, handled by the people who can change the code.
TechSteps handles technical SEO at engineering depth: crawlability, indexation, site architecture, internal linking, rendering, performance, structured data and migration risk. The work happens in the code and the server configuration rather than in a spreadsheet of recommendations somebody else has to implement.
What this solves
Technical SEO usually arrives as a document. An agency audits the site, produces a list of findings, and hands it to a development team who have their own priorities and no context for why any of it matters. Much of it is never implemented, and the parts that are get implemented approximately.
The other failure is subtler. Technical SEO gets treated as a checklist of tags when the real issues are architectural: a site structure that buries important pages, a rendering approach that hides content from crawlers, a URL pattern generating thousands of near-duplicate pages, or a migration that discarded years of accumulated signals.
We do this work as engineers. We can read the application, find the cause, and make the change.
When people call us
If more than one of these sounds familiar, the underlying cause is often a single issue rather than several separate ones.
Technical scope
Not every engagement includes all of this. The scope is agreed in writing before we start, and anything excluded is named rather than left ambiguous.
How we approach it
Server logs show which URLs are requested, how often and what status they return. This is evidence rather than inference, and it regularly contradicts what a crawl tool suggests.
These are different problems with different fixes. A page that is not crawled, one that is crawled and not indexed, and one that is indexed and not ranking need completely different work.
A meta description will not rescue a page buried six clicks deep with no internal links. Structural problems produce most of the value.
Fetch the page as a crawler would and check the content is present. Applications that depend on client-side rendering sometimes serve very little in the initial HTML.
We make the changes, or work directly with your developers with enough context that the intent survives implementation.
Index coverage, crawl statistics, impressions on non-brand queries. Technical work often shows up in coverage and impressions before it shows up in traffic.
What goes wrong
These are the patterns we see most often when we are called in to fix someone else's work, or our own from earlier in our careers.
A long document with no owner and no prioritization. The findings may be correct and the outcome is identical to having done nothing.
Thousands of near-duplicate URLs generated by parameters, canonicalized rather than prevented. Crawl budget is still consumed and the underlying issue remains.
A directive intended for one template applied to a whole section, sometimes carried over from a staging configuration. Pages disappear and nobody connects it to the deployment.
The initial HTML is nearly empty. Rendering may happen eventually, and relying on it is a risk with no upside when the alternative is serving real HTML.
The single most damaging technical SEO event, and entirely preventable with an inventory done beforehand.
Questions we actually get asked
It could be several things and the diagnosis is usually quick. Common causes are a noindex directive left from staging, a canonical pointing elsewhere, pages with no internal links so they are effectively undiscoverable, content thin enough not to be worth indexing, or on large sites simply not being crawled yet. Search Console distinguishes most of these directly.
More so, if anything. Answer engines still have to crawl, parse and understand your pages. A site that is hard for a search crawler to process is hard for an AI system to use as a source. The fundamentals did not change; the consequences of getting them wrong extended to more surfaces.
Worth passing, and rarely the reason a site is not ranking. They are a tiebreaker rather than a primary factor. If your pages are slow enough to fail, fix that, and do not expect passing to be the thing that moves you up when the actual gap is content or authority.
It helps machines understand your content and it is not magic. Use it where it accurately describes what is visible on the page: organization details, articles, breadcrumbs, products where they exist. Adding markup for things not on the page is a policy violation as well as being useless.
Indexation fixes can show within days. Architectural changes usually take weeks to be recrawled and reassessed. Anything depending on accumulated authority takes months. Be sceptical of anyone promising fast results from technical work, and be equally sceptical of a technical audit that cannot say what it expects to change.
Describe the system and what is going wrong with it. A short technical conversation is usually enough for us to tell you whether this is the right work and roughly what it involves.