Technical SEO and audits that fix what holds you back.

A technical SEO audit is a structured review of everything that affects whether search engines can crawl, render, index and trust your site, separate from content and links. It looks at crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals and speed, site architecture, structured data, HTTPS, internal linking and mobile. The output that matters is not a raw tool export but a prioritised list of the issues actually holding your rankings back, ordered by the impact fixing them will have.

It covers the foundations under content and links: making sure search engines can crawl the site efficiently, that the right pages are indexed and the wrong ones are not, that pages load fast and pass Core Web Vitals, that the architecture and internal linking guide both users and crawlers, and that structured data, HTTPS and mobile are all sound. Technical SEO does not create rankings on its own; it removes the barriers stopping your content and links from earning the rankings they should.

A one-off technical audit is priced on the size and complexity of the site, and ongoing technical work usually sits inside a monthly plan ($500, $900 or $1,500). Boltly scopes the audit to your site and can quote the fixes separately so you can implement them yourself or have us handle them. We quote a real figure in writing after seeing the site, with no lock-in. See our pricing.

Core Web Vitals are Google's measures of page experience. Largest Contentful Paint measures loading and should be under about 2.5 seconds; Interaction to Next Paint measures responsiveness and should be at or under about 200 milliseconds; and Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability and should be at or under about 0.1. They are a real ranking signal, and just as importantly they affect whether visitors stay, so passing them helps both rankings and conversions.

The most common reason is the status Crawled - currently not indexed in Google Search Console, which usually means Google saw the page but judged it too thin, too similar to others, or not worth indexing. Other causes are accidental noindex tags, blocked crawling in robots rules, canonical tags pointing elsewhere, or crawl budget wasted on low-value URLs so the important pages are reached late. An audit finds which of these applies and what to do about each.

Crawl budget is the amount of crawling a search engine will do on your site in a given period. On small sites it is rarely a concern, but on larger ones it matters, because if crawlers spend their budget on parameter URLs, filters, duplicates and low-value pages, your important pages get crawled less often and updated slower in the index. Managing crawl budget means directing crawlers toward what earns revenue and away from what does not, through robots rules, canonicals and internal linking.

A full technical audit once a year suits most sites, with a lighter check after any major change, a redesign, a migration, a platform move or a sudden traffic drop, because those are exactly when technical problems get introduced. Large or fast-changing sites benefit from ongoing monitoring rather than a once-a-year snapshot.

It depends on the issue and who implements it. Some fixes, like correcting a noindex tag or a robots rule, take minutes and can show in the index within days. Others, like improving Core Web Vitals or restructuring a large site, take development time and then a few weeks for search engines to recrawl and re-evaluate. We prioritise fixes by impact and effort so the quick, high-value ones ship first, and set an honest timeline for the larger ones.

Usually not, but check two things before you delete it. Automated crawlers flag hundreds of warnings on almost any site, most of them cosmetic, and an unsolicited report with a scary score is mostly a sales opener. Google's page on hiring an SEO tells site owners to be wary of firms that email out of the blue. What is worth a look: open Search Console and check the Pages report for important URLs that aren't indexed, and the Manual actions report for any penalty. If both are clean, the email can wait. A useful audit names specific URLs, explains why each one matters, and is still worth having if you never hire the person who wrote it.

Some technical fixes are DIY, and we will tell you which. Correcting obvious tags, compressing images or installing a caching plugin are within reach for many owners. But diagnosing why pages are not indexed, reading log files, improving Core Web Vitals on a page builder, or handling a migration safely usually need experience and tools many owners don't have. A good approach is an audit that hands you the quick wins to do yourself and flags the deeper work worth outsourcing.

A technical audit focuses on the foundations, crawling, indexing, speed, architecture and structured data, whereas a full SEO audit adds content, keywords, on-page and off-page factors and competitive analysis on top. If your content and links are reasonable but rankings are stuck, a technical audit is often the right start. If you want the complete picture and a full action plan, a broader SEO audit is the better fit.

Start with an audit. We crawl your site, pull your Search Console and analytics data, and produce a prioritised report of the technical issues holding you back, each with its impact and the fix, ordered so the quick, high-value wins are obvious. From there you can implement the fixes yourself, have us handle them, or a mix. There is no obligation and no lock-in.