BLUEHARBOURD3
Book an intro call

Depth 02.1 · Search and AI visibility · Level 3

Technical SEO foundation

Technical SEO foundation is the part of search work that decides whether a page can be fetched, rendered, recognised as unique and stored in a search index at all. When this layer fails, content and links cannot make the page appear, because the search engine never kept it.

Specification

Input
Crawl access to the site, Search Console data, and server or CDN logs where you have them.
Method
We crawl the site the way a search engine does, compare what we find with what Search Console reports as indexed, and trace each gap back to a template, a configuration setting or a server response.
Deliverable
Crawl and index audit: a ranked register of issues, each with its cause, the pages affected and the fix.
Measured by
The share of submitted URLs that Search Console reports as indexed, and Core Web Vitals against the "good" thresholds Google publishes on web.dev (industry benchmark: LCP 2.5 seconds or less, INP 200 milliseconds or less, CLS 0.1 or less).

Most often bought inB2B software, Professional services, Ecommerce

The artefact, before and after

Crawl and index audit: a ranked register of issues, each with its cause, the pages affected and the fix.

Before: a blank technical SEO foundation record with a row for each of crawl access and robots rules, javascript rendering checks, canonical tags and duplicate handling, xml sitemaps and index coverage, core web vitals, and no entries. After: every row carries a finding and a checked status, which is the state the work hands over.

Inside it

  • 01Crawl access and robots rules
  • 02JavaScript rendering checks
  • 03Canonical tags and duplicate handling
  • 04XML sitemaps and index coverage
  • 05Core Web Vitals
Deliverable · Level 4→ Crawl and index auditA crawl and index audit is a written comparison of three lists: the URLs your site exposes to crawlers, the URLs your sitemap declares, and the URLs the search engine has actually indexed. Every mismatch between them is a defect with a cause, and the audit names the template or rule that produces it.

Typical first engagement

The usual order of a first piece of work. Timing and price are set at scoping, once we have seen the stack.

  1. 01Access and baselineYou get: Read access to Search Console and logs, and a snapshot of indexed page counts.
  2. 02Crawl and compareYou get: A crawl of the site set against the sitemap and the index, with every mismatch listed.
  3. 03Ranked fix listYou get: Each defect with its cause, affected URLs and the template that produces it.
  4. 04First fixes shippedYou get: The highest ranked fixes as reviewed changes in your repository.

Search and AI visibility

Next in this line

A question people ask about this

Does the audit change anything on the live site?
No. The audit only reads the site and its server logs. Fixes come afterwards as separate, reviewed changes that you approve one by one.

Ask about this part of the stack

Write one question about technical SEO foundation in your own systems. We answer it in writing and name what we would need to see to answer it properly.

Send one question

A written reply, no call needed.