What does a technical SEO consultant actually do day-to-day?
Three things, in roughly equal share. First, audit and triage: log-file analysis, crawl simulation in Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, rendering-pass diff (Googlebot vs Chrome), schema validation against Rich Results Test and Google's content rules, Core Web Vitals against CrUX field data not Lighthouse lab. Second, written specs handed to your engineering team via GitHub PRs or Linear tickets, with acceptance criteria a non-SEO engineer can implement. Third, post-deploy verification: re-crawl, re-render, check the changes actually shipped and Google ingested them. The work is unglamorous, mostly invisible from outside, and where most of the actual ranking movement comes from on a serious site.
How much does technical SEO cost in 2026?
For senior independent work: UK £950/mo Starter, £1,800/mo Growth, £4,000/mo Franchise · US $1,200 / $2,300 / $5,100 per month · Canada CAD $1,650 / $3,100 / $6,900 per month. Pre-engagement, a fixed £500 / $650 / CAD $875 audit (refunded against the first retainer invoice if you sign within 30 days) is the right starting point for any site over 50 pages. Migration projects are scoped separately at £4,500–£15,000 depending on URL count and integration complexity.
Do you work with React, Next.js, Remix, Astro, and other modern JS stacks?
Yes: modern JavaScript frameworks are the most common stack we work in. Next.js is a daily driver. We audit rendering strategy template-by-template (SSR vs ISR vs SSG vs CSR), surface CSR-by-accident pages that Googlebot is failing to render in the first pass, and either ship the SSR refactor ourselves via PR or hand a written spec to your engineers. Same applies to Remix, Astro, Nuxt, SvelteKit, and Gatsby. SPA frameworks without a rendering strategy (Create React App, Vite SPA marketing pages) typically need a rebuild, not a fix.
How do you handle Core Web Vitals: Lighthouse versus CrUX?
CrUX field data is what Google ranks on. Lighthouse lab scores are useful for debugging but are not the scoreboard. We pull the CrUX dataset by template (homepage, category, product, blog, service) and surface the 75th-percentile LCP, INP, and CLS, segment by device and country, and prioritise fixes by ranking impact not lab-score cosmetics. A 2.4s LCP at p75 on mobile is usually a more pressing fix than a 92 Lighthouse score on desktop, even though the latter looks worse in a deck.
What schema types do you implement and why does it matter?
Depending on the site: Organization, WebSite, Person, Article, Product, SoftwareApplication, Service, OfferCatalog, FAQPage, HowTo, BreadcrumbList, ItemList, Review, AggregateRating, LocalBusiness, Place, Review, Course, JobPosting, Recipe. The point is not coverage for its own sake: it is rich-result eligibility (FAQ, How-to, Product, Review snippets) and entity disambiguation so Google understands what your site is about. We validate every schema against Rich Results Test and Google's actual content rules, not just JSON-LD syntax.
Can you do international / hreflang work for multi-region sites?
Yes. Hreflang implementation is one of the most commonly broken parts of multi-region sites and one of the highest-leverage to fix. We audit current implementation (sitemap-based vs link-tag-based vs HTTP-header), surface mismatches and self-reference errors, design a clean architecture that scales (per-region subfolder, ccTLD, or subdomain depending on your CDN and editorial setup), and validate ingestion in Search Console's International Targeting report. Most multi-region sites have hreflang issues that suppress 10–25% of their international rankings.
Do you do site-migration / replatform SEO?
Yes: migration protection is one of our core engagements. Replatforms (Magento → Shopify, WordPress → Headless, custom → Next.js, etc.) lose between 20% and 60% of organic traffic on average when run without SEO supervision, and that loss is often permanent. We run pre-migration crawls, build a 1:1 URL mapping, design 301 redirect chains, preserve canonical signals, validate schema migrates intact, and run weekly post-launch ranking checks until traffic is fully recovered. Migration projects scope at £4,500–£15,000 fixed-fee depending on URL count.
What does a log-file analysis surface that a normal crawl does not?
Three things a normal crawl misses. First: which pages Googlebot actually visits versus which pages it ignores: your crawl budget allocation in reality, not theory. Second: pages crawled but not indexed, the gap between discovery and inclusion that often points to thin-content or canonical issues. Third: orphan pages Googlebot found from external signals (backlinks, sitemaps) that your internal link graph does not surface. We pull 30 days of access logs, parse Googlebot-verified hits only, and produce a written report on crawl-waste and crawl-priority gaps. On sites over 5,000 URLs the findings usually justify the audit cost three times over.
How long until technical SEO fixes show ranking impact?
Faster than content or links. Typical timelines: rendering and indexability fixes (4–8 weeks to full recrawl and ranking re-evaluation), schema and rich-results (2–6 weeks for SERP feature capture), Core Web Vitals improvements (4–12 weeks as field data updates and Google ranks on the new p75), internal-linking and canonical fixes (4–10 weeks). Migrations and large architectural changes can take 8–16 weeks to fully recover. Anyone promising faster is selling.
How do you measure technical SEO success beyond rankings?
Five metrics, all surfaced in a custom dashboard connecting GA4 + Google Search Console + your CRM. (1) Indexed-page count over time, segmented by template: the canonical health signal. (2) Crawl-frequency from log files, by template: Googlebot prioritisation. (3) Rich-results capture rate by template: schema effectiveness. (4) Field Core Web Vitals at p75: Google's actual ranking signal. (5) Organic-sourced revenue or qualified pipeline: the commercial scoreboard. Vanity rankings-per-keyword dashboards are not on the list.