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Passieon

Technical SEO in the UK

Technical SEO decides whether the rest of your SEO is allowed to count. A page that cannot be crawled cannot rank, and a page quietly telling Google not to index it will sit there earning nothing while somebody writes more pages beside it.

Unlike content, this work is finite. Most UK sites can be cleared of the faults that matter in the first month or two, and after that it is monitoring plus whatever a new release breaks. Anybody selling technical SEO as a permanent monthly retainer is selling you the monitoring at the price of the fixing.

How the work is done

Indexing first, because nothing else counts without it

Pages blocked in robots.txt, pages carrying a noindex nobody meant to leave on, pages canonicalised to something else, pages the crawler never reaches because nothing links to them. Every one of these makes a page worthless no matter how well it is written, and we find them before anything else.

Speed measured where the visitor is

Not a score out of a hundred on a desktop connection. What matters is how long a real phone on a real connection waits before it can read the page, and the usual causes are large images, render-blocking scripts and fonts loaded from somewhere else.

Redirects and dead links, which quietly accumulate

Chains of redirects, links to pages that moved, and old URLs pointing at a 404 all waste crawl budget and lose visitors. They accumulate on every site that has ever been redesigned, and nobody notices because the home page still works.

Structured data that describes what is actually there

Schema helps a search engine read the page, and it has to match the page. Markup declaring questions the page does not contain, or a rating nobody gave, risks losing the rich result and can attract a manual action. We only mark up what a reader can see.

What is different about search in the UK

Directories hold the first page

For many trade and service terms the top results are aggregators. Two routes past them: the map pack, and pages specific enough that a directory listing cannot answer the question.

Town and postcode, not region

Buyers search by town. A page covering a whole county competes with pages written about each town in it, and loses to all of them.

British English, properly

Spelling, the word for the trade and the way an address is written all signal whether a page was written for this market or translated into it.

Searches in the UK run on google.co.uk, which returns a different result set to google.com. Work is checked against the one your customers actually use.

What you get

  • A full crawl and a fix list ordered by what each fault is costing you
  • Indexing checked page by page: robots, noindex, canonicals and orphan pages
  • Speed work on the pages that actually receive visitors, measured on mobile
  • Redirect chains and dead internal links cleared
  • Structured data added where it describes something on the page, and removed where it does not
  • The fixes done or handed to your developers as a written list, whichever you prefer

Also on this site

Results from real clients

Every number below is from the client’s own Google Search Console, for the period shown. Impressions are how often the site appeared; clicks are people who arrived. What each visit is worth is your sales process, not ours, so these are the visits we can prove rather than a conversion figure we cannot.

See all eight client results

  • 52,993clicks
    Up and Running Physical Therapy
    Physical therapy · 1 Mar 2023 to 14 Mar 2024
    Impressions
    2,238,155
    CTR
    2.4%
    Avg. position
    13.49

    +139,355% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

  • 12,285clicks
    Backcountry Physical Therapy
    Physical therapy · 6 Jul 2023 to 31 May 2024
    Impressions
    601,822
    CTR
    2.0%
    Avg. position
    19.3

    +2,059% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

  • 7,630clicks
    Your Place Physical Therapy
    Physical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
    Impressions
    284,589
    CTR
    2.7%
    Avg. position
    15.66

    +1,184% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

  • 6,816clicks
    Peak Endurance
    Performance and physical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
    Impressions
    482,378
    CTR
    1.4%
    Avg. position
    16.16

    +1,174% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

How the engagement works

There is no package to pick from. What the site needs is decided on a call and written down before any work starts, because a business with one location and a clean site needs a different month to an agency reselling to twelve clients.

  1. 01

    A call, before anything is quoted

    Thirty minutes on what you sell, where you sell it, and what the site looks like today. No scope is written before that conversation, because the right work depends on all three.

  2. 02

    A written scope and quote

    What will be done, in what order, and what it costs, in writing. Nothing starts until you have agreed to it.

  3. 03

    Month to month from there

    The work runs monthly and the scope changes as the site does. Cancel with 30 days’ notice.

True of every engagement

  • Search Console and Analytics set up in your name, so the data is yours
  • No lock-in: month to month, cancel with 30 days’ notice
  • One person you can email, in your working hours
  • Every change listed in the monthly report

Book a call with us

Questions about technical seo in the UK

Is technical SEO a one-off or ongoing?

Mostly one-off, which is unusual in this trade and worth saying. The backlog gets cleared in the first month or two and after that it is monitoring, plus whatever a new release breaks.

Do you need access to our site?

It helps and it is not required. Some clients give us access, others take a written fix list for their own developers. The list is written to be handed over without us present.

Our developer says the site is fine. Is it?

Often it is fine as software and still has SEO faults, because they are different questions. A site can be fast, secure and well built and still be telling Google not to index half of it.

What if the fixes need a rebuild?

Then we say so rather than charging for work that cannot succeed. If a rebuild is the honest answer, the migration has to be planned so the rebuild does not cost you what you already earn.

How do you get past Checkatrade and Yell?

You do not out-rank them on their own terms cheaply. You take the map pack, which they cannot enter, and you write pages specific enough that a directory listing is not a substitute for them.

Do you write in British English?

Yes, and it matters more than it sounds. A page reading "optimize your tire center" tells a UK reader immediately that nobody involved is local to them.

What comes first?

A free written read of the site within two working days, then a call, then a written quote. Nothing starts before you have that in writing.

Book a call with us

A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.

Message us

Message us

Ask anything about your site or where your enquiries are going. It goes straight to a person, not a bot. Leave an email and you get a reply.