01 Technical SEO
Traffic dropped and nobody can tell you why
It is almost never a mystery. Traffic falls for a short list of reasons, and every one of them is checkable. I find which one it is, tell you plainly, and then fix it — I write the code myself, so the diagnosis and the repair are the same job.
02 Diagnosis
The usual suspects
Six causes account for most drops. Open the one that sounds like yours — each says what I check and what fixing it involves, so you can judge whether you need me at all.
A migration that leaked
“Traffic fell within days of a redesign, replatform or URL change.”
I map every old URL against the new one and find the ones that 404, chain through three redirects, or quietly land on the homepage. Then I check whether Google has actually recrawled them.
A clean, one-hop redirect map. It is unglamorous work and it is very often the entire problem.
On one rebuild I found the old homepage still live and accumulating clicks six months after launch, competing with the page that replaced it.
Pages Google will not index
“You publish, and nothing happens. Search Console shows pages “discovered” but not indexed.”
Index coverage by page type, canonical tags, robots directives, sitemap accuracy, and whether the pages are reachable by crawling rather than only by sitemap.
Usually internal linking and canonical conflicts rather than anything exotic. Pages nobody links to look unimportant, because they are.
The site is slow where it counts
“It feels fine on your laptop. Core Web Vitals say otherwise on a phone.”
Real measurement on real templates — not just the homepage — covering LCP, CLS and INP, plus total page weight and request count, which are usually more revealing than a score out of 100.
Depends what is causing it: a bloated theme, unbounded plugins, uncompressed images, render-blocking scripts. Sometimes a rebuild is genuinely the cheaper answer.
One site went from WordPress to a hand-coded Astro build for exactly this reason.
Your own pages competing
“Several pages rank for the same term, all of them badly, none of them winning.”
I cluster every page against the terms it ranks for and find the overlaps — the near-duplicate posts written years apart that are now splitting the same signal.
Merge the useful parts into one strong page and redirect the rest. Losing pages usually gains traffic.
I found eight near-duplicate pages on one site, all stranded between positions 28 and 80 for the same cluster.
Thin pages carrying real demand
“A page ranks on page two for something valuable, and it is 200 words long.”
Impressions and average position per page, set against word count and internal links. High demand landing on a thin page is the most common quick win there is.
Rebuild the page around what the searcher actually needs, and link to it properly from elsewhere on the site.
An algorithm update
“The drop lines up with a dated Google update and hit a whole section at once.”
Compare the drop date against confirmed update windows, then look at which page types lost and which held. The pattern usually names the cause.
Honest answer: sometimes there is no quick fix, and the work is rebuilding quality on the affected pages. I will tell you if that is where you are rather than sell you a sprint.
03 Scope
What a technical engagement covers
The audit is the start, not the deliverable. A list of problems you cannot act on is worth very little — so the fixes are included, and I implement them rather than emailing you a spreadsheet and wishing you luck.
WordPress, Elementor, Shopify or a hand-coded build — I work in the codebase directly, whichever it is.
- Full crawl of the site, at whatever scale it is
- Index coverage and canonical conflicts
- Redirect maps for migrations and replatforms
- Core Web Vitals, page weight and request count
- Structured data and rich result eligibility
- Internal linking structure
- Cannibalisation and duplicate content
- Mobile rendering and template-level issues
04 What this looks like
The common version: a site carrying a slow, bloated theme, years of accumulated plugin weight, and a migration that quietly broke half its redirects. The temptation is to patch it. Usually the honest answer is to replatform and re-optimise on the way through.
Whichever way it goes, the migration window is disclosed — data gaps, ranking wobbles and all. Pretending those aren’t there would make everything else I tell you less believable.
Talk through your site05 Cost
Technical fix
£599one-off
A fixed price, paid once. No retainer, and no assumption that you will want one.
The audit, the prioritised fix list, and the fixes actually implemented — then a follow-up once Google has recrawled, so you know they took. If you want it watched from then on, that comes with the monthly plans.