Technical SEO audits and fixes · London & UK
Technical SEO Consultants Who Fix What They Find
Most sites do not have a rare technical fault. They have a common one that nobody has looked for. Send your website address below and see where yours stands.
Rated 5 stars across 300+ Google reviews. Call 0207 112 8794.
Speed and Core Web Vitals checks.
Get your free page speed check
Send your website address below. We will check it by hand, and within 2 working days you will get a plain English result covering:
- Whether your Largest Contentful Paint passes Google’s 2.5 second mark
- Whether your Interaction to Next Paint passes the 200 millisecond mark
- Whether your Cumulative Layout Shift passes 0.1
This checks speed and Core Web Vitals only, which is one of the nine checks in a full audit. Quieter sites get lab results, because Google needs enough real visitors before it can report real ones.
Takes about 20 seconds. No obligation.
Thank you
Your speed check request is on its way. We will check your site by hand and email you the result within 2 working days. If it is urgent, call us on 0207 112 8794.
How we work
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One client per niche, per area
We will not take your competitor.
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The price is the price
Published above, confirmed before we start.
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A named specialist
You work with a person, not a ticket queue.
Traffic dropped after a rebuild or a site move? That is almost always a technical fault introduced at launch, and it is the quickest thing on this page to fix.
See what breaksWhat technical SEO is
Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines crawl, render and index your website. First Place SEO runs the audit and carries out the fixes, for businesses across London and the UK.
- Loading under 2.5 seconds
- Response under 200 milliseconds
- Layout shift under 0.1
- Crawl paths search engines can follow
- Indexing rules set correctly
- Pages that render for Google
- Technical audits from £750
- Redirects mapped after a site move
- Structured data that validates
Loading, response and layout shift are the three measures Google publishes as Core Web Vitals.
Audits start at £750, and the price is agreed before any work begins.
Do you need it?
Most Websites Do Not Have a Crawl Budget Problem
Ask three agencies about technical SEO and at least one will mention crawl budget. It sounds serious and expensive. For almost every business website in Britain, it is neither.
Who the Guidance Is Written For
Google’s own crawl budget guidance (opens in a new tab) says plainly who it is written for. Sites with more than a million unique pages. Sites over ten thousand pages that change every day. Sites with a large share of their URLs sitting in Search Console under Discovered, currently not indexed.
Google then adds the line most agencies leave out: if your pages get crawled on the day you publish them, you do not need the guide at all. If you run a forty page website for a service business, that is you. Your crawl budget is fine.
Broken Pages Are Not Wasting It
One more thing that gets sold as urgent. Broken pages returning a 404 do not waste your crawl budget. Google states that the crawl still happened, a status code came back, and no content was downloaded. A 404 on a page you deliberately deleted is the correct answer, not a fault.
The Five Minute Check
Open Google Search Console, go to Settings, then Crawl stats. You will see ninety days of crawl requests, your average server response time, and a breakdown by response code. If the request count is steady and new pages turn up in search within a day or two, crawling is not what is holding you back.
What Is Probably Wrong Instead
None of that means nothing is wrong. It means the thing that is wrong is probably duller, and duller problems are the ones quietly costing you rankings.
If you would like a second opinion first, you can get a free homepage review from a real person and we will come back within two working days.
What actually breaks
The Faults That Cost You Rankings Are Boring
Technical SEO pages love the exotic. Hreflang tags, faceted navigation, log file analysis at enterprise scale. All of that is real and all of it matters on very large sites. It is almost never what is wrong with a twenty to two hundred page business website.
Read the six lines, then open any that sound familiar
A noindex tag left switched on
One line of code telling Google to keep a page out of search.
It goes on during a rebuild, somebody forgets to take it off, and the page never appears no matter how good it is.
A robots.txt rule blocking a section
A single line in a single file can hide a whole folder from every search engine.
Nobody spots it, because the pages still load perfectly well for humans.
A sitemap arguing with the site
Your XML sitemap lists pages that your own site separately tells Google to ignore.
Google receives two contradictory instructions and picks one.
Internal links pointing at redirects
Your menu links to an old URL, which bounces to the new one.
It works, but every crawler and every visitor takes the long way round, and the chains build up quietly after each rebuild.
Four versions of the same page
With www and without. With a trailing slash and without. With a tracking parameter attached.
To a crawler those are separate pages competing with each other for the same term.
Soft 404s
A page that is empty or broken but still reports success.
Google is told everything is fine, so a dead page sits in the index doing nothing.
Almost all of them arrive on the same day: launch day.
A rebuild, a platform move or a redesign is when noindex tags get left on, redirects get missed and staging robots rules get copied across. If your traffic fell shortly after a site change, start here before you look anywhere else.
Every one of those is fixable in hours. Every one is invisible until somebody goes looking. Phones have their own set of issues and we cover how your site behaves on phones separately, though it is worth knowing that Google has crawled every site with its mobile crawler since 5 July 2024, so the phone version of your site is now the version that counts.
What the audit covers
Nine Checks, Not a Two Hundred Line Export
Run any website through a crawler and it will flag two hundred issues. Most of them do not matter. The job is working out which handful genuinely affect what you sell, and that is the part no tool can do for you.
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1. Crawling
Whether search engines can reach the pages that earn you money, and whether they are spending their time on pages that do not.
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2. Indexing
Which of your pages are in Google’s index, which are missing, and the reason given for each one.
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3. Loading speed
Largest Contentful Paint against Google’s 2.5 second mark, measured on your real visitors, not on a fast laptop in an office.
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4. Responsiveness
Interaction to Next Paint against the 200 millisecond mark. It replaced First Input Delay in March 2024 and it is the measure most sites now fail.
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5. Layout stability
Cumulative Layout Shift against 0.1. This is the one where the button moves just as you go to tap it.
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6. Duplicate URLs
Every version of every page, and which single version your canonical tags actually point at.
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7. Site structure
How your pages link to each other, which pages nothing links to, and where redirect chains have built up.
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8. Structured data
Whether your schema markup is present, valid, and describing the thing you think it is describing.
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9. Server and security
Response codes, response times, HTTPS setup, and anything a staging subdomain has left sitting open.
You get the findings ranked by what each one is likely to be worth, written in plain English, plus a call to walk through it together.
We fix it, not just find it
An Audit You Do Not Act On Is Just a PDF
The standing complaint about technical SEO is not that it fails. It is that the report arrives, everyone agrees it looks thorough, and nothing changes. Six months later the same issues are still sitting there.
That happens because much of what gets sold as an audit is a tool export. A crawler gathers the data, somebody adds a cover page, and the interpretation, which is the part that takes judgement and hours, never happens at all.
We work the other way round. The audit is the start of the job here, not the deliverable.
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We look
We crawl the site, pull your Search Console and speed data, and go through all of it by hand. Around two weeks for a typical site, and we confirm the exact timeline once we have seen how large it is and what it is built on.
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We rank it
Every issue gets sorted by likely commercial impact, not by how alarming the crawler made it sound. You get a short list.
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We fix it
On the Audit and Fix option we make the changes ourselves. Anything that genuinely needs your developer comes with a written brief they can work from without a meeting.
Audit only, or audit and fix. Both prices are published on this page.
Transparent pricing
Here is the price, before you have to ask
Every technical SEO page we looked at while building this one said the same thing about cost. Get in touch. That is not much help if you are trying to work out whether you can afford it at all.
UK technical audits run from around £400 for an automated export up to £5,000 and beyond for large sites, with mid sized sites commonly quoted between £1,200 and £2,400. Ours sit inside that market, and they are the prices we charge.
Technical SEO Audit
Find out what is actually wrong.
£750one off
Get a fixed price- Sites up to around 100 pages
- All nine checks, gone through by hand
- A ranked fix list in plain English
- A call to talk it through
Audit and Fix
We make the changes as well.
£1,500from
Get a fixed priceEverything in the audit, and:
- We carry out the fixes ourselves
- A written brief for anything your developer must do
- Changes checked after they go live
Migrations and larger sites
Site moves and anything over 1,000 pages.
£2,500from
Get a fixed priceEverything in audit and fix, and:
- Site moves and platform changes
- Ecommerce sites
- Quoted once we have looked at the site
We confirm the tier and the price before any work starts. No obligation either way.
Plan or project
Buy It Once or Keep It Running
Technical work makes up roughly a third of a healthy monthly SEO budget, so there are two sensible ways to pay for it.
As a one off project
Best when you can name the problem. You pay once, we fix it, you carry on.
Traffic dropped after a rebuild. A migration is coming up. The site has never been checked and you want to know where you stand. Any of those is a job with an end, so paying for it once makes sense.
Inside a monthly plan
Best for watching the technical side rather than checking it once. All three plans include it.
Sites break again. A plugin update, a new page template, a change your developer made on a Friday, and something goes quietly wrong six weeks later. You can see how the monthly plans are priced on the packages page.
If you cannot decide, start with the audit. It costs less, and what it turns up tells you whether the rest is worth doing. Technical work is also one part of the wider SEO campaign this sits inside, so nothing gets paid for twice if you go further later.
Before you buy
Technical SEO Is Not Always the Answer
Plenty of sites rank badly for reasons that have nothing to do with how they are built. If that is your site, a technical audit will not fix it, and you will have spent money finding out.
There are four cases where we turn the work down. We would rather you read them now than hear them on a call after you have already decided.
If none of those is you, the audit is the cheapest way to find out where you actually stand.
AI crawler access
One Line in a File You Have Never Opened Decides Whether AI Can Quote You
Google’s documentation is clear that there is nothing extra to do for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Be indexed, be eligible for a snippet, and you are in the running. That is the whole list.
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are a different matter, because they send their own crawlers. Each company runs one crawler for training and a separate one for search, and the two are controlled separately. That means you can keep your content out of model training and stay eligible to be cited in answers. What you cannot do is block the search crawler and still expect to be named.
Sorting crawler access out is a technical SEO job, and it sits underneath being named in AI answers, not instead of it. It is part of every audit we run.
More Things Are Reading Your Site Than Ever
Ten years ago one crawler mattered. Now there are half a dozen, they belong to different companies, and more arrive every year. What none of them has changed is the requirement: every one has to reach your page, render it and understand it before it can put your business in front of anybody.
Book a Free CallFree, no obligation, and we will say so if we are not the right fit.
Or run the free speed check at the top of this page first.
Frequently Asked Questions
Technical SEO, Answered Straight
Book a Free Call
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines crawl, render and index your website. It covers crawling, indexing, loading speed, site structure, duplicate pages, structured data and server setup. It does not cover what your pages say, which is content, or who links to them, which is authority.
Do 404 errors hurt my SEO?
Usually not. Google states that pages returning an error status code do not waste crawl budget, because the crawl happened and no content came back. A 404 on a page you deliberately removed is the correct response. What does cause trouble is a broken page reporting success instead, which is called a soft 404.
Why is my website not being indexed?
The usual culprits are a noindex tag left switched on, a robots.txt rule blocking the section, a canonical tag pointing somewhere else, or a page Google has seen and judged not worth adding. Search Console’s Page Indexing report names the reason for each URL, and that is where any investigation should begin.
My PageSpeed score is green, so why have my rankings not moved?
The large score at the top of PageSpeed Insights is a lab estimate from a simulated load on one device. What actually feeds Google’s ranking signals is field data from real Chrome visitors, measured at the 75th percentile across a rolling 28 day window. A site can look quick in the lab and fail in the field. It also means a genuine fix takes several weeks to show up. There is more detail on how PageSpeed Insights gathers its data (opens in a new tab).
Can you do technical SEO for a London business?
Yes. We are based at International House, 4 Maddox Street, London W1S 1QP, and we cover London and the wider UK. The work runs remotely either way, so your location makes no difference to how it is delivered. London clients who would prefer to meet are welcome to.
How much does a technical SEO audit cost in the UK?
UK technical audits run from around £400 to over £5,000, with mid sized sites commonly quoted between £1,200 and £2,400. Ours start at £750 for sites up to about 100 pages, and £1,500 if you want us to make the changes as well. You get the price confirmed before any work starts.
Drop us a message
How can we help?
Tell us about your business and what you want to achieve. We will review your website and come back to you with clear recommendations and a proposed plan.
