Traffic that finally converts
Technical audit with crawl and speed fixes, buyer-intent on-page work, internal links rebuilt.
Visits 2,140 → 4,432 · orders 116 → 149
For UK businesses whose website looks fine to people but not to Google
By Muhammad Zohaib Ameer, SEO specialist · Updated November 14, 2026 · 9 min read
Technical SEO agency work for UK sites, done by one specialist.
You do not need a technical SEO agency with a project manager to find out why Google ignores half your site. You need someone who can read a crawl, a log and a Search Console report, and who can explain the fix to your developer without the jargon.
By Muhammad Zohaib Ameer, SEO specialist · Updated November 14, 2026 · 9 min readA morning in a crawl log
Four of six requests wasted.
GET /robots.txt 200 ok
GET /sitemap.xml 200 412 URLs, 180 redirect
GET /services/boiler-repair 301 → /services/boiler-repair/
GET /services/boiler-repair/ 200 noindex · LCP 5.8 s
GET /shop?colour=red&sort=new 200 duplicate of /shop
GET /contact/ 200 indexed · LCP 1.9 s
Illustration. Real logs look like this, only longer.
In 30 seconds
- What: making sure Google can find, read, load and understand every page that matters, and ignore the ones that do not.
- Effect: blocked pages reappear in weeks. Speed and structure gains build over months.
- Rule: technical SEO removes limits. It does not create demand. Fix it, then build.
- Cost: $499 once (about £395) for the audit; fixes and monitoring from $799 a month (about £630).
Tools I use for this
Screaming Frog
Google Search Console
Google Analytics 4
WordPress
Shopify
Elementor
Screaming FrogGoogle Search ConsoleGoogle Analytics 4WordPressShopifyElementorIn one paragraph
What does a technical SEO agency actually do?
Technical SEO is the work of making a website easy for search engines to crawl, index, load and understand, so that the pages you want to rank can rank. A technical SEO agency, or a specialist doing the same work, checks how Google moves through the site, which pages it keeps and drops, how fast pages load for real UK visitors on real phones, whether the structured data is correct, and whether redirects, duplicates and errors are quietly wasting Google's attention.
Free estimator
How much of Google's attention does your site waste?
Take the crawl figure from Search Console's Crawl stats report and your own sense of the site. Rough, but the direction is usually right.
Time for Google to refresh your real pages
0
A rough model. Google does not crawl evenly, and it says crawl budget mostly matters for very large or fast-changing sites. The point is the ratio of waste to real pages.
Technical SEO problems, and the fixes
What goes wrong on UK sites and how it gets fixed.
| Problem | How you notice it | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Pages crawled but not indexed | The Pages report in Search Console grows in the wrong column | Merge thin or duplicate pages, strengthen internal links, improve the content that is left |
| Filter and parameter URLs | Thousands of URLs for a few hundred products | Canonicals, robots rules and cleaner navigation so one version is crawled |
| Slow pages on mobile | Core Web Vitals fail in Search Console | Image sizes, fonts, lazy loading, fewer scripts, better hosting |
| Redirect chains and loops | Old URLs bounce twice before landing | One hop from old to new, and internal links updated |
Speed, measured on real phones
Core Web Vitals: three numbers Google reads.
Google measures how real visitors experience your pages with three figures: how quickly the main content appears, how fast the page responds to a tap, and how much the layout jumps while loading. It calls them LCP, INP and CLS and reports them in Search Console from real Chrome users.
The thresholds are published: main content within 2.5 seconds, a response within 200 milliseconds, and a layout shift score under 0.1, for most of your visitors. The sites I audit fail most often on the first one, usually because of a huge hero image, a slow theme or too many apps and plugins.
Speed is a small ranking factor and a big conversion factor. A page that loads in two seconds on a train with one bar of signal earns more enquiries than one that loads in eight. I fix the causes, not the score.
What technical SEO includes
From the first crawl to weekly monitoring.
Crawl and index audit
The whole site crawled and compared with what Google has indexed, so wasted and missing pages are both visible.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Image, font, script and hosting fixes, with before-and-after numbers from real users.
URL hygiene
Canonicals, redirects, parameters, pagination and sitemaps tidied so Google spends its time on real pages.
Structured data
Schema for your organisation, local business, products, services and FAQs, validated and kept valid.
Platform-specific fixes
WordPress, Elementor, Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce each break in their own ways. I know where to look.
Monitoring
Search Console checked every week, so a bad plugin update or a developer's slip is caught in days, not months.
How it works
Three views of the site, one list of causes.
- Crawl, logs and Search Console
What a crawler finds, what Google requested, and what Google kept: three views of the same site.
- Group by cause
Hundreds of symptoms become a short list of causes, ranked by how many pages and how much revenue each one touches.
- Fix in order
Blockers first: noindex, robots, redirects. Then duplicates and speed. Then structure and schema.
- Brief your developer, or do it myself
Each fix written as a ticket. On WordPress and Shopify I can usually apply them directly.
- Measure and watch
Index coverage, Core Web Vitals and rankings tracked, with monitoring so problems do not creep back.
The effect
What technical fixes change, and when.
Weeks 1 to 2
Blockers removed. Pages that were hidden by a tag or a rule start to be crawled again.
Weeks 3 to 8
Indexing improves, redirect chains disappear, Search Console errors fall. Core Web Vitals fixes show in field data after about a month.
Months 2 to 4
Rankings move for pages that were held back by duplicates or slow loading. Rich results appear where schema was added.
Months 4 to 12
A clean site makes every later page and link work harder. This is where technical work pays off most.
Limit
Technical SEO cannot rank a page nobody searches for, or beat a competitor with more useful content.
Why, and why not
Who needs the technical work, and who can skip it.
You need this if
- Pages you published are not in Google, or keep dropping out.
- Search Console shows failing Core Web Vitals or thousands of odd URLs.
- Your store has far more URLs than products.
- You moved platform or redesigned, and traffic fell afterwards.
You do not need this if
- You have a ten-page site on a clean theme that loads fast and is fully indexed. Spend on content and links instead.
- Your problem is that nobody searches for what you sell.
- Your developer can fix the handful of issues in a free audit. Let them.
- You want a one-time speed score for a screenshot. I fix causes, and the score follows.
Technical mistakes I keep finding
Six ways a UK site hides from Google by accident.
Noindex left on after launch
The developer hid the site from Google during the build and nobody removed the tag. Weeks of invisibility.
Blocking CSS and JavaScript in robots.txt
Google needs those files to render the page. Block them and it sees a broken layout.
Every filter combination as a page
Colour, size, price and sort create thousands of URLs for a few hundred products, wasting crawls and splitting signals.
Redirecting everything to the home page
After a redesign, old URLs sent to the home page lose their rankings. Each should go to its closest match.
Twelve plugins doing one job
Caching, lazy loading and image plugins fighting each other make a site slower, not faster.
Do it yourself or hire someone
What you can safely do, and what needs a careful hand.
| Task | Do it yourself? | Why it is usually handed over |
|---|---|---|
| Submit a sitemap and check the Pages report | Yes | Reading what the columns mean takes experience |
| Compress and resize images | Yes, with a plugin or app | Themes often load the full-size image anyway |
| Fix a few broken links and redirects | Yes | Chains across hundreds of URLs need a crawl and a plan |
| Clean up filter and parameter URLs | Rarely | One wrong canonical or robots line can hide real pages |
| Write and validate structured data | Possible on simple pages | Stores and multi-location sites need careful nesting |
Real results
When the technical work came first.
Client confidentiality
Technical work shows up in Search Console graphs that belong to the client, so I publish them only with permission. These two businesses, one in the UK and one in the US, agreed, and in both cases crawl and speed fixes came before anything else.
From page three toward page one
Crawl and speed fixes, keyword targeting, more content and better internal links.
Clicks 706 → 1.99K · position 20.7 → 13.3
One UK store and one US business; labels show which.
Technical SEO cost
Audit first. Then fixes, if you want them done.
SEO X-Ray
$499 one-time
A full technical audit with every fix written as a ticket. About £395. Your developer can run with it from here.
⭐ Fits this serviceGrowth
$799/month
Audit plus the fixes, done by me or with your developer, and weekly monitoring. About £630 a month.
Premium Growth
$1,999/month
Large stores and multi-site setups, with faster delivery and quarterly re-crawls. About £1,580 a month.
What changes the price
- $499 once (about £395) for the audit; $799 a month (about £630) or $1,999 a month (about £1,580) when fixes and monitoring are included.
- Platform: a custom build or an old theme takes longer than a tidy WordPress or Shopify site.
- Size: a site with 50,000 URLs is a different job from one with 500.
- Developer time on your side, hosting upgrades and paid plugins are separate; no UK VAT is added.
I do the work myselfWho does the work
One specialist. No hand-offs.
I'm Muhammad Zohaib Ameer. I have worked in SEO since 2022 for businesses in the US, UK, Canada and the UAE. I read crawl logs for fun, which is not normal, but it means your developer gets a precise ticket rather than a vague complaint.
Questions about technical SEO
Technical SEO FAQ.
What is the difference between technical SEO and normal SEO?
Technical SEO deals with how the site is built and served: crawling, indexing, speed, structure and code. On-page SEO deals with the words on the pages and the links to them.
Do I need a technical SEO agency, or can one person do it?
The work is the same. An agency brings a team and account management, which very large sites may need. For most UK sites, one experienced specialist can do everything on this page, faster and for less.
How do I know if my site has technical problems?
Open Search Console. If the Pages report shows many pages not indexed, the Core Web Vitals report shows poor URLs, or the number of known URLs is far bigger than your real page count, you have technical work to do.
Will fixing Core Web Vitals improve my rankings?
Sometimes a little, rarely a lot on its own. The bigger gains are in conversions and in removing failures that hold back otherwise strong pages.
Can you work with my developer or web agency?
Yes. Most of my technical work is delivered as clear tickets with the fix, the reason and a way to test it.
Does technical SEO apply to Shopify and WordPress sites?
Yes, with different problems. Shopify handles the basics well but creates duplicate and tag URLs and can slow down under apps. WordPress and WooCommerce depend on themes, plugins and hosting, so there is more to go wrong and more to fix.
“Before you pay anyone for technical SEO, open Search Console and look at one report: Pages. If the number of pages not indexed is bigger than the number indexed, you have found your first conversation.”
Muhammad Zohaib Ameer · OvaVerseMore for UK businesses
UK SEO services, page by page.
Free, no obligation
Find out what is blocking your pages.
Send your website. Within 48 hours you get a short recorded video audit showing the crawl, index and speed problems I can see from outside, and which to fix first.
- Personal to your site, never shared
- No sales call needed
- Reply within 24 hours
The photo on this page is a custom AI-generated illustration, not a real client or event. Diagrams and sample numbers are labelled illustrations; case study screenshots are real.