Rankings dropped after a migration. A competitor is climbing while your money pages stall. Search Console is full of warnings nobody on the team has time to triage. Technical SEO that actually moves the four numbers that matter — and the implementation to back it up.
Recent technical SEO work: Sherwin-Williams · M.L. Campbell · Sayerlack · Postmedia network properties
Pick the shape that fits the work in front of you: a one-time audit when your team has development capacity, an audit-and-implement engagement when they don’t, a monthly retainer when ongoing competitive pressure means SEO is a continuous discipline, or an enterprise engagement for multi-site portfolios and high-stakes migrations. All four shapes are scoped honestly to the work, not padded for an agency margin.
Who this is for
- Fit. Sites with measurable organic traffic where a recent migration, content change, or platform update has broken something — Search Console is reporting indexation drops, ranking declines, or coverage warnings.
- Fit. Sites that have plateaued after a year of “we’re doing SEO” and need an outside pair of eyes to find what’s actually blocking. Most engagements surface 2–4 specific issues that have been quietly costing visibility.
- Fit. Sites preparing for a migration, replatforming, or major release that needs a pre-launch technical audit so launch day isn’t a surprise.
- Fit. Businesses with active organic competition where staying ahead requires ongoing technical attention, not just content — monthly retainer territory.
- Fit. Multi-site portfolios (publisher networks, franchise systems, enterprise brands with subsidiary sites) where coordinated technical work across properties matters.
- Not fit. Brand-new sites without enough indexed pages or backlinks for technical SEO to matter yet. Content and earned links come first.
What this typically fixes
- Indexation problems. Pages that should be in the index aren’t, or pages that shouldn’t be in the index are. Most sites have at least one of each.
- Crawl-budget waste. Faceted-filter URLs, paginated archives, and parameter combinations that absorb crawl budget without adding value.
- Schema and structured data. Missing or invalid Service, Product, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList, Organization, Person markup. Each Search Console enhancement report cleared and validating.
- Speed and Core Web Vitals. Real fixes (image pipeline, render-blocking assets, font loading, third-party script audit) rather than installing a “speed plugin” that swaps one set of issues for another.
- Internal linking architecture. Money pages getting fewer internal links than they deserve; orphan pages no one can find; authority flowing the wrong direction.
- Migration redirect cleanup. 301 chains, broken redirects, lost canonical signals from a recent rebuild or platform change.
- Conversion-event instrumentation. GA4 form-completion events tied to traffic source — most sites can’t actually answer “is organic search converting” because the events aren’t wired up. The engagement begins with fixing that.
Tiers and what each one delivers
Four shapes covering most situations. I bill at $275 an hour on hourly engagements; the tier is set by scope, not by rate.
| Investment | Shape | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| $3,500–$5,000 | One-time audit. 1–2 weeks. | Teams with their own development capacity. You get a prioritised fix list ranked by revenue impact and implementation effort. You implement; I document. Best for in-house technical teams that want an outside pair of eyes. |
| $5,000–$15,000 | Audit + implementation. 4–8 weeks. | The audit, plus the fixes applied directly. Quick wins ship first, structural work follows. Best for teams without spare developer cycles, or for engagements where the fixes need someone with deep WordPress (or platform-specific) experience. |
| $3,500–$5,000/mo | Monthly retainer. Ongoing. | Continuous technical attention — quarterly audit cycles, schema work, performance monitoring, Search Console maintenance, schema-eligibility tracking. Best for sites with active competitive pressure where SEO is a continuous discipline rather than a project. |
| $15,000–$50,000 | Enterprise engagement. Multi-week to multi-quarter. | Multi-site portfolios, complex migrations, high-stakes platform launches, brand consolidations. Custom-scoped to the business; pricing reflects scope rather than per-property cost. |
The four numbers I track for every engagement
Technical SEO succeeds or fails on whether four numbers move. Each one maps to a different part of the funnel; together they tell you whether the engagement worked. The handoff document at the end is the before/after on these four.
- p75 LCP per template, mobile, last 28 days. The Core Web Vitals threshold that drives ranking and the metric that correlates most cleanly with conversion. The target is under 2.5 seconds on every conversion-critical template. Watch the trend, not the snapshot.
- Top-10 organic landing pages and their position trend. Search Console performance report, segmented to the URLs that drive qualified traffic. The engagement is working when the highest-converting pages climb; it is failing when blog posts climb but money pages don’t.
- Form-completion rate by source. GA4 event tracking on every form submit, segmented by traffic source (organic search, direct, referral, email). Organic-search form completion is the single number that ties technical SEO to revenue. Most clients have never instrumented this; the engagement begins with wiring it up.
- Schema rich-result eligibility. Search Console enhancement reports — service, FAQ, product, breadcrumb, article. Each report should be free of errors and have growing valid-item counts. Errors here are the most fixable bugs in technical SEO; they should never persist past week two.
Trust cues
- WordPress development since 2007; technical SEO delivery since 2014.
- Engagements across Sherwin-Williams brands (M.L. Campbell, Sayerlack), the Postmedia network of Canadian daily newspapers, higher-ed institutions, government teams, and Niagara-region businesses.
- Author of practical WordPress and SEO articles read by site owners across Canada and the United States.
- MA in Learning and Technology, Royal Roads University; verifiable profiles on LinkedIn, GitHub, WordPress.org, and X.
