The problems you can't see.
Speed, structure and crawlability for South African websites — the invisible work that decides whether Google can rank the content you already have.
What is technical SEO, and why does it come first?
Technical SEO is everything that decides whether Google can find, read and trust your pages at all. It comes first because content cannot rank on a site that loads slowly, blocks crawlers or serves the same page under four addresses. Writing more pages on a broken foundation is the most common way businesses waste an SEO budget.
Google can't read it properly
Pages blocked in robots, content loaded only by JavaScript, or a structure that buries pages five clicks deep. What cannot be crawled cannot rank.
It loads too slowly
Speed is a ranking signal and a conversion one. A slow page loses positions and loses the visitors who did arrive.
The same page, several times
Duplicate versions under different addresses split your own ranking strength between them, so none of them ranks as well as one would.
What does technical SEO actually cover?
Four areas, worked in this order: crawling and indexing, speed, mobile behaviour, and the markup that tells Google what a page is. Every fix is checked against real measurements rather than a plugin's traffic-light score.
Crawling and indexing
Robots rules, sitemaps, canonical tags and redirects — so Google spends its time on the pages you want ranked, not on duplicates and dead ends.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Image weight, render-blocking scripts, plugin bloat and server response. Measured on the three vitals Google actually uses, not a made-up score.
Mobile behaviour
Google ranks on the mobile version of your site. Layout that shifts while loading, tap targets too close together and text too small all count against you.
Structured data
Markup that spells out what a page is — a service, a product, a set of questions — so search engines can present it properly rather than guessing.
Does site speed really affect rankings?
Yes, though not as dramatically as people claim. Google measures three things it calls Core Web Vitals: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and how much the layout jumps around while loading. They are a genuine ranking factor — but the bigger effect is on whether visitors stay, which matters regardless of Google.
How fast it appears
The largest thing on screen — usually a hero image — needs to arrive quickly. Oversized images are the most common cause of failing this.
How fast it responds
Tapping a menu and waiting is what makes a site feel broken. Usually caused by scripts competing for attention while the page is still loading.
How much it moves
Content jumping as images and ads load, so you tap the wrong thing. Fixed by reserving the space before the content arrives.
How does a technical SEO project run?
Audit, fix, verify — with the audit free and the fixes quoted at a fixed scope before anything is touched. Everything is measured before and after, so you can see what changed rather than taking our word for it.
Find what's wrong
A full crawl of the site plus real performance data, producing a list of problems ranked by how much each is likely costing you. Free, and yours to keep.
Decide what's worth fixing
Not every warning matters. We separate the issues genuinely holding you back from the ones that only look alarming in a report.
Work on staging first
Changes made and tested on a copy of the site, so a fix for one thing cannot quietly break another before it reaches your visitors.
Measure the difference
The same measurements re-run afterwards, alongside indexing and search performance, so the improvement is demonstrated rather than assumed.
What does technical SEO cost?
Usually a fixed-scope project rather than a monthly retainer, because most technical problems get fixed once and stay fixed. Smaller sites are often covered by the technical work already inside an SEO plan from R3 500 a month. The audit is free either way, and the quote follows it.
Technical SEO questions we get asked most.
Not necessarily. Those plugins check whether you filled in a title and used your keyword a few times. They cannot tell you that half your pages are not indexed, that your images are three megabytes each, or that two versions of your homepage are competing. Green lights measure tidiness, not performance.
Faster than most SEO work. Because you are removing something holding the site back rather than earning a new position, movement often shows within weeks. Speed improvements are visible immediately; indexing changes take as long as Google takes to recrawl.
Mostly one-off. Fix the crawl problems, the speed and the duplication, and they stay fixed unless the site changes significantly. What is ongoing is watching for new problems as pages get added — which is what a care plan covers.
Often, yes. Compressing images, removing unused plugins and fixing render-blocking scripts go a long way. But if the site runs a heavy page builder loading everything on every page, there is a ceiling — and at that point a rebuild costs less than fighting it forever. We will tell you which situation you are in.
Considerably. Server response time is the starting gun for every other speed measurement, and budget shared hosting packs hundreds of sites onto one machine. Some speed problems cannot be fixed in the site at all — they need better hosting.
Different problems. Technical SEO fixes what stops Google ranking your site; local SEO works on appearing in map results for your area. If the site has technical problems, fix those first — local work built on a broken foundation underperforms.
Yes. We are based in Gauteng and do technical SEO for businesses across South Africa, including Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban. All of it is done remotely.
Good content, no rankings?
Send us your web address. We'll crawl the site, measure it properly, and tell you what's technically holding it back — ordered by what it's likely costing you, and honest about which warnings don't matter.