Technical SEO in Birmingham
Technical SEO Birmingham firms need before content and links can pay off: faster pages on phones, clean indexing, working schema and safe site moves. We find the problems, rank them by impact and fix them.
- Core Web Vitals
- Indexing fixes
- Safe migrations
What technical SEO covers
Technical SEO is everything that decides whether Google can find, read and trust your pages before anyone judges what they say. If a page is blocked, painfully slow on a phone or a near copy of another page, the best writing in the world will not help it rank.
The work covers how your site is built and served: crawling, indexing, speed, structure, structured data and the way pages link together. It also covers the risky moments, such as moving to a new platform or domain, when a few missed redirects can wipe out years of rankings.
Most Birmingham business sites we audit are built on WordPress, Shopify, Wix or Squarespace. Each has its own habits, and we know which settings to check first on each one.
What we check on every site
The core of every technical audit, in the order we usually work through it.
Core Web Vitals
Loading, layout shift and responsiveness on a mid-range phone, the device most of your visitors use.
Crawling
Robots rules, sitemaps, broken links and redirect chains that waste Google's time on your site.
Indexing
Which pages are in Google, which are missing and why. Duplicates, thin pages and canonical tags checked.
Schema
Organisation, local business, service, product, FAQ and article markup, tested and error free.
Internal links
Key pages linked from the right places, with clear anchor text and no orphaned pages.
Migrations
Redirect maps, staging checks and launch day tests when you change platform, design or domain.
Problems we find on Birmingham business sites
From recent audits. Most are quick to fix once found.
| Problem | How often we see it | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Pages set to noindex after a redesign | Common on new sites | Key pages missing from Google entirely |
| Huge images and sliders on the home page | Very common | Slow loading on phones and higher bounce |
| Location pages with the same text | Common with trades and agencies | Google ranks one and ignores the rest |
| Old URLs not redirected after a move | Common after platform changes | Lost rankings and broken links from other sites |
| Several versions of the site live | Less common, serious | Signals split between www, non-www and http |
| Product filters creating thousands of URLs | Common on shops | Crawl wasted, real pages indexed slowly |
How a technical project runs
- 01Days 1 to 3
Crawl and audit
Full crawl of the site, Search Console checks and speed tests on real templates.
- 02Day 4
Ranked fix list
Every issue listed with its effect and the effort to fix it, most valuable first.
- 03Days 5 to 10
Fixes
We make the changes ourselves where we have access, or brief your developer clearly.
- 04Ongoing
Check and monitor
Changes verified in Search Console, then the site is watched each month for new problems.
How we report technical fixes
Technical work is easy to hide behind jargon, so we report it in a way you can check. Every fix is listed with the page or template it touched, the date it went live and what changed as a result, such as pages added to the index or a faster load time.
Where a fix needs your developer, the report says exactly what to change and why, so there is no back and forth. Where we cannot measure an effect yet, we say so rather than claiming credit.
Start with the Kickstart
The quickest way to get the technical basics right.
Kickstart, £295 one-off
A full technical and on-page audit, a ranked fix list and fixes to up to 10 of your most important pages, finished within 10 working days. You keep everything.
Ongoing monitoring
Every monthly plan includes technical checks. The Ecommerce and National plans add regular health checks and monitoring of larger sites.
Technical SEO Birmingham sites cannot skip
Technical problems rarely announce themselves. A plugin update adds a noindex tag, a new theme doubles the page weight, or a developer changes URLs without redirects, and enquiries quietly fall over the following weeks. Regular checks catch these before they cost you work. If you would like an outside view first, an SEO consultant in Birmingham can review the site before any work starts.
Technical SEO is also the base for everything else in our Birmingham SEO plans. Content and links work far better on a site Google can crawl quickly and trust. If you are planning a redesign, talk to us before it goes live, not after.
Speed matters more than most owners expect. Most Birmingham searches for local services happen on phones, often on mobile data, and a page that takes several seconds to show anything loses a share of visitors before they read a word. We test on mid-range phones over a throttled connection, because that is closer to how your customers actually see the site than a fast office laptop.
Structured data is the other quiet win. Clear markup for your business, services, products and FAQs helps Google show richer results and helps AI tools describe you accurately. It costs little to add and keeps paying back.
Technical SEO by platform
What we usually find first on the platforms Birmingham firms use most.
| Platform | Common issue | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Plugin bloat, duplicate tag and archive pages | Trim plugins, noindex thin archives, cache and compress |
| Shopify | Duplicate product URLs through collections | Canonical product links and cleaner internal linking |
| Wix and Squarespace | Weak control over titles and structure | Rewrite titles, fix headings and tidy page URLs |
| Custom builds | Rendering issues and missing redirects | Server-side rendering checks and a full redirect map |
Moving to a new website without losing rankings
A new website is the single biggest technical risk most firms take. Designers focus on how the site looks, which is right, but rankings depend on what happens to the old URLs, the content and the internal links when the switch is made.
We start before launch. Every old URL that gets traffic or links is mapped to its new home, the new templates are checked on a staging site, and titles, headings and structured data are compared with the old pages. On launch day we test the redirects, submit the new sitemap and watch Search Console closely.
For the weeks after launch we check rankings, crawl errors and enquiries every few days. Small drops are normal while Google recrawls, but anything larger gets investigated straight away rather than at the next monthly report.
If your site is already live and traffic fell after a move, we can still help. Old URLs can often be found in Search Console, backlink tools and archived copies of the site, and redirecting them months later still recovers much of what was lost.
Technical groundwork for AI search
Clean structured data
Clear facts about your business, services and prices in markup that AI tools can read.
Readable pages
Content in the page itself, not hidden behind scripts that some crawlers cannot run.
Crawler access
Robots rules checked so the AI crawlers you want can reach your pages.
Technical SEO FAQs
What is technical SEO?
How do I know if my site has technical problems?
Can you work with my developer?
Do you handle website migrations?
Will speed improvements help my rankings?
Do I need technical SEO if my site is new?
How often should a technical audit be done?
Birmingham SEO you can test for free
Send your website and get a free Birmingham SEO audit within one working day: where you rank, what is holding you back and three fixes you can start on, whether or not you hire us.