Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the layer every other SEO investment rests on — and the most common reason a Norfolk site underperforms in both Google and AI search. Unity SEO audits and fixes the infrastructure of your site so search engines and AI answer engines can crawl it, index it, trust it and cite it. If the foundations are broken, no amount of content or link building recovers the shortfall. We fix them first.

If you want the theory — what each layer does and why it works — read the Technical SEO pillar guide. This page is about the service: what we do, what it costs to get wrong, and how an engagement runs.

What Broken Foundations Actually Cost

Most technical problems are invisible from inside the business. The site loads. The forms work. The phone rings a little. Nothing looks broken.

The damage sits in the parts you cannot see. A blocked page is never indexed, so the content you paid for never competes. A duplicate URL splits its signals with a near-identical twin, so neither ranks. A slow hero image loses the visitor before they read a word. Each of those failures now has a second consequence: an AI engine that cannot reach or parse a page cannot cite it either.

The cost lands in three places.

• Content that never works. You keep publishing and nothing moves. Usually the pages are not indexed, or not being crawled at all.
• Budget spent on the wrong layer. More content and more links will not fix an indexing problem. Both are billed monthly and neither compounds, which makes this the most expensive mistake in SEO.
• Risk in the projects that move the site. A redesign or platform change without a redirect map can erase years of rankings in a weekend. Recovery is slow and never certain.

What We Do

We work through Unity SEO's Four-Layer Framework, bottom-up, because each layer depends on the one beneath it. There is no point perfecting structured data on a page Googlebot cannot reach.

Layer 1 — Crawling & Discoverability

Can a machine find the page at all?

• robots.txt. The most damaging error on a small business site is a stray Disallow line that blocks a whole section. We also check that AI crawlers are not blocked by a rule added for a different reason.
• XML sitemaps. Indexable, canonical URLs only. No redirects, no 404s, no noindex pages. A lastmod that reflects real edits rather than every deploy.
• Internal linking. Your strongest crawl signal, and the one most often left to chance. We remove orphan pages and make the hierarchy say what actually matters.
• Crawl budget. Rarely the bottleneck below about ten thousand URLs. Decisive once faceted navigation or a listings database is involved. We tell you which side of that line you are on instead of selling a fix you do not need.

Layer 2 — Indexing & Indexability

Crawled is not the same as indexed. This layer decides whether a page is eligible to appear at all.

• Canonicals and duplication. One authoritative URL per topic, self-canonicalised, never pointing at a redirected or noindex page.
• Crawled, currently not indexed. The most common Search Console report on content-led sites. It usually means thin pages, competing duplicates, or a crawl budget spent on URLs nobody wants. We work out which, because each has a different fix.
• noindex versus Disallow. A noindex tag keeps a page out of the index but still allows crawling, which is how Google reads the instruction. A robots.txt block stops the crawl, so the tag is never seen. Confusing the two can keep pages in the index for months.
• Soft 404s. Pages that return a 200 with "not found" content waste crawl budget. We return the correct status.

Search Console is the ground truth, not a third-party estimate. We validate every fix in URL Inspection and the Page Indexing report rather than trusting a crawl tool's opinion.

Layer 3 — Performance & Core Web Vitals

Google measures speed from real user sessions at the 75th percentile. A page is only "good" when three-quarters of its real sessions meet the threshold. A fast laptop on office wifi is not the test.

We diagnose against the three 2026 metrics.

INP is the metric most sites fail. Around 43% miss the 200 ms threshold, which makes it the highest-leverage fix for most Norfolk businesses. The usual causes are unmanaged third-party scripts and long JavaScript tasks.

The engineering method behind the fixes is covered in the Core Web Vitals guide.

Layer 4 — Understandability: Structured Data & Semantics

This layer makes the site readable by machines and the business a verifiable entity.

• JSON-LD schema. Organization or LocalBusiness for the entity, Article and Author for expertise, FAQPage where real questions exist, BreadcrumbList for structure. Written into the template, not injected by a plugin after the page renders.
• Semantic HTML. One H1, a heading order that follows the document, real lists and tables, and link text that describes where it goes. This helps screen readers and AI extraction for the same reason: the meaning is in the markup.
• Entity consistency. Name, address and phone identical across the site, the Google Business Profile and every directory that matters. Inconsistency damages local ranking and machine trust at the same time.
• Accessible HTML. We confirm priority pages render their substance without JavaScript, because that is still how AI engines retrieve and cite content.

Implementation detail lives in the Schema Markup guide.

Site Migrations

Domain changes, replatforms and redesigns carry the most risk of any technical project. We map every old URL to its new one, crawl the old site before it moves, test the new one against that map, and watch the weeks after launch. The method is set out in the site migration guide.

Who This Is For

• Sites that are not being indexed. Search Console shows pages excluded, or "crawled, currently not indexed" on content you expected to rank.
• Businesses publishing consistently without movement. If the content is good and the rankings are flat, the problem is usually upstream of the content.
• Sites carrying third-party weight nobody chose. Chat widgets, pixels, heatmaps and consent tools accumulate, and no one owns their cost.
• Anyone planning a migration, redesign or replatform. The cheapest technical work is the work done before the move.
• Businesses that want to be cited by AI. An engine cannot cite a page it cannot crawl, parse or verify. That is a technical problem before it is a content problem.

This is not the right starting point for a site that does not exist yet, or one whose copy is still being written. Technical SEO amplifies a site that has something to say. If the site itself needs building, that comes first.

Most of our technical work is for Norfolk businesses, from Norwich to the market towns, where a handful of competitors usually take both the Map Pack and the AI answer. Losing the technical layer means losing both at once. The same work underpins every sector we serve, from law firms to home improvement.

What the Evidence Says

Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking input, not a tie-breaker. Google assesses them from field data. Lab scores do not count, which is why a green PageSpeed number on a site that feels slow to customers means nothing.

INP is the metric that moves. It replaced First Input Delay in March 2024 and now fails on roughly 43% of sites. Most of that failure is third-party JavaScript.

AI search runs on the same infrastructure. Every AI answer engine starts with a crawler. Google has confirmed that AI discovery remains bound to crawlable HTML pages. A site that is technically sound is eligible for AI citation. A site that is not, is not.

Crawl budget matters only at scale. Below about ten thousand URLs it is rarely the constraint. Above it, or with faceted navigation in play, it becomes decisive.

Our Approach

Phase 1 — Audit (weeks 1–2). A full crawl, a Search Console review and a field performance baseline. The output is one prioritised list scored by impact, not a two-hundred-point PDF full of noise.

Phase 2 — Fix plan (week 2). We separate what decides rankings from what merely tidies up, and show the reasoning. You should be able to read the plan and disagree with it.

Phase 3 — Implementation (weeks 2–6, by scope). We fix it ourselves or write a spec your developers can build against. Either way, every change is tied to the issue it resolves.

Phase 4 — Validation and monitoring (ongoing). We confirm each fix in Search Console and in the field, then monitor indexing and web performance monthly. A fix that is not validated is a claim, not a result.

What You Get

• A prioritised technical audit with the reasoning shown, not a checklist of everything that could be better.
• Pages that are crawled, indexed and free of duplicate signals.
• Core Web Vitals passing on field data, at the threshold Google actually uses.
• Structured data that makes you eligible for rich results and for AI citation.
• A site AI crawlers can reach, parse and trust.
• Monthly monitoring, so a new template or tag does not quietly undo the work.

What It Costs

We scope after the audit, not before. The audit and fix plan is a fixed price, and every price is published on the pricing page. Implementation is either a short engineering engagement or part of your developer's existing work. Migrations are priced as their own line, because the risk sits in the redirect map, not in the hours.

We will tell you when a fix is not worth the money. Plenty of sites need three changes, not thirty.

Book a free technical SEO audit — we will show you the highest-impact issues holding your Norfolk site back in Google and AI search.

Sources: Google crawl budget documentation; Search Engine Journal, Google on llms.txt; Search Engine Hub, Core Web Vitals 2026; Unity SEO Technical SEO pillar and Core Web Vitals guides.