The layer search engines read before they read your writing
Technical SEO is the work of making a site legible to search engines: that pages can be crawled, that content exists in the HTML rather than appearing only after JavaScript runs, that canonicals and redirects are coherent, and that the architecture connects every page worth having.
Content strategy assumes search engines can already read your site. Frequently they cannot, and nobody has checked. Technical SEO is the unglamorous layer underneath everything else, and it is the layer where a year of content investment quietly fails to compound because the pages carrying it were never properly indexable.
The faults we find most often are structural rather than exotic. Content rendered client-side, so it exists for a visitor with JavaScript and not for a crawler that does not execute it reliably. Canonical tags pointing at the wrong URL, or at a page that redirects. Parameter URLs generating thousands of near-duplicates. Orphaned pages that nothing links to. Redirect chains left behind by two previous site moves. And a sitemap listing URLs that are noindex, which tells a search engine two contradictory things about the same page.
When this work makes sense
Questions worth asking any supplier
Does the audit end in a document or in fixes? An unimplemented audit changes nothing.
Has anyone checked what the page looks like with JavaScript disabled? That is close to what Bing sees, and Bing powers Yahoo and DuckDuckGo.
Do the sitemap and the robots directives agree with each other? Contradictions are common and self-inflicted.
Are redirects one hop? Chains accumulate through successive site changes and nobody notices.
Is the fix list prioritised by impact, or is it every issue a tool reported? Most crawler warnings do not matter.
Deliverables
A full crawl of the site as a search engine sees it, not as a browser renders it
Indexation analysis: what is indexed, what is not, and which of those is intentional
Rendering check confirming content is present in the initial HTML response
Canonical and redirect audit, with chains collapsed to single hops
Site architecture review — orphans, crawl depth, internal link distribution
Structured data implementation and validation
Sitemap and robots.txt brought into agreement with what is genuinely indexable
The fixes implemented, prioritised by impact rather than by tool severity rating
Built with
Process
Technical work begins by comparing three things that should agree and usually do not: the pages you have published, the pages your sitemap advertises, and the pages actually indexed. The gaps between those three sets point directly at the real problems, and they are more informative than any crawler's warning list. A site with 400 pages, 380 in the sitemap and 90 indexed has a specific problem, and that comparison finds it before any tool is opened.
The standard nine stages — discovery, strategy, UX/UI, development, content and SEO, testing, launch, measurement, continuous improvement — apply to every project. The paragraph above is what differs for this one.
What moves the number
Pricing depends on scope, functionality, integrations and content requirements. These are the factors that change it most:
Audit only, audit and fix, or ongoing technical maintenance
Audit only
Fits: Teams with in-house developers who will implement
Limits: The document is worthless until someone does the work, and most audits are never implemented
Audit and fix
Fits: Most businesses — the findings and the implementation together
Limits: Needs access to the site, and some fixes depend on your platform allowing them
Ongoing technical maintenance
Fits: Large or frequently changing sites where new issues appear continuously
Limits: Unnecessary for a stable brochure site that rarely changes
Case studies
No published technical SEO case study. Before and after traffic charts are the easiest artefact in this field to present without context, and we will not add one.
MBGDesk operates from 4 offices — India, United States, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates. We hold no industry certifications and do not imply otherwise.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if we have technical SEO problems?
Compare the number of pages you have published with the number Search Console reports as indexed. A large gap is the clearest signal, and it is visible in about two minutes without any specialist tooling.
Our site is a React application. Is that a problem?
It depends entirely on whether it renders on the server. Google can execute JavaScript, though not instantly or always. Bing is considerably less reliable at it, and it serves Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. If your content only exists after scripts run, you are gambling on the crawler's patience.
What is a canonical tag and do we need one?
It tells search engines which URL is the authoritative version when similar content exists at several addresses. Every indexable page needs one, and it should point at itself unless there is a deliberate reason otherwise. Canonicals pointing at redirecting URLs are a common and quietly damaging error.
Will structured data improve our rankings?
Not directly. It helps search engines understand entities and can produce rich results for some types. Note that Google retired HowTo rich results and restricted FAQPage ones to recognised government and health sites in 2023, so anyone justifying thin FAQ blocks by promising rich results is out of date.
How long do technical fixes take to show results?
Indexation changes can appear within days of a recrawl. Ranking improvements that follow from better crawlability take longer and depend on what else is competing. Technical work removes obstacles; it does not by itself create demand.
Our tool reports 300 errors. Are they all real?
Almost certainly not. Crawling tools flag everything they can detect regardless of whether it affects anything. A substantial portion of a typical report is noise, and prioritising by tool severity rather than by actual impact is how technical budgets get spent on nothing.
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Tell us what you are trying to build and we will come back with scope, approach and an estimate.