Technical SEO
Technical SEO for local SEO
The foundations local rankings depend on: a site search engines can crawl, index, and understand, that loads fast on a phone, and that agrees with your Google Business Profile.
- Mobile performance and Core Web Vitals
- Indexing and crawlability fixed
- LocalBusiness schema matched to your profile
- Site structure built for services and locations
Technical remediation delivered alongside every local SEO engagement
What technical SEO covers for a local business
Six areas. Most local sites don't have a technical problem in general — they have two or three specific ones.
Mobile performance
Local search skews heavily to mobile — 62% and 78% across our own client profile data. Google evaluates the mobile version, so that's the score that counts.
Crawling and indexing
Pages blocked in robots.txt, noindex tags left from staging, orphaned location pages, and sitemaps never updated after a rebuild.
Site architecture
Every commercial page reachable within three clicks through links a visitor can see. Location pages are the ones that get stranded.
LocalBusiness schema
Name, address, phone, hours, and service area as structured data, matching your Business Profile character for character.
Duplicate page cleanup
Rebuilds routinely leave two or three near-identical pages targeting the same service and city, splitting whatever authority the original had.
Crawlable business details
Address, phone, and hours as real HTML text, not baked into an image or injected after the crawler has moved on.
Score your own site against eight standards
Each names a check you can run in a couple of minutes and a single condition that counts as a pass. Tick as you go — the score stays in your browser, there’s no form, and nothing is sent to us.
The eight standards
0 / 8 passing
Every commercial page is actually in the index
- How to check
- Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and count what comes back.
- Passes if
- Every service page and every location page you rely on appears.
- Why locally
- A suburb page that is not indexed ranks nowhere at all. On the Fiji engagement, indexing problems were holding back pages that were otherwise ready.
No commercial page is more than three clicks from the homepage
- How to check
- Start at your homepage and click through to your least important service page. Count.
- Passes if
- Three clicks or fewer, using links a visitor can see.
- Why locally
- Location pages tend to get stranded in footers or dropdowns. Depth is the most common reason a page crawls slowly and ranks late.
The page is usable one-handed, on mobile data, outdoors
- How to check
- Open your service page on a phone, off wifi, and try to find the phone number without pinching.
- Passes if
- Number reachable in one thumb movement, text legible without zoom.
- Why locally
- 62% of the searches that surfaced one client's profile happened on a phone, and 78% for another. Mobile is not a segment in local search, it is the majority case.
Address and hours are real text, not baked into an image
- How to check
- Try to select your address with the cursor, or use ctrl-F to find your own phone number.
- Passes if
- Both select and both are findable by search.
- Why locally
- Details rendered inside a graphic are invisible to the crawler that is trying to reconcile your site with your Business Profile.
LocalBusiness structured data matches the profile exactly
- How to check
- Run your page through Google's Rich Results Test and compare the name, address and phone against your Business Profile, character by character.
- Passes if
- Structured data present, valid, and identical to the profile.
- Why locally
- Near-matches are worse than absences. A suite number in one place and not the other is a contradiction Google has to resolve by discounting one of them.
Location pages are not canonicalised into one another
- How to check
- View source on two location pages and compare their canonical tags.
- Passes if
- Each points at itself.
- Why locally
- This is the quiet killer of multi-location sites. Every suburb page collapses into one, and the others stop existing as far as search is concerned.
Only one page targets each service-and-place combination
- How to check
- Search site:yourdomain.com followed by your main service and city.
- Passes if
- One obvious page, not three near-identical ones.
- Why locally
- Duplicate landing pages compete with each other. Splitting one strong page into three weak ones is a common outcome of a site rebuild nobody audited.
It loads on a mid-range phone, not on your office connection
- How to check
- Run PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab, not the desktop one.
- Passes if
- Mobile score is not in the red, and largest contentful paint is under 2.5s.
- Why locally
- Emergency and same-day categories lose people at the loading screen. The desktop score is the one that flatters you; the mobile score is the one customers experience.
Your band
The foundation is the whole problem
Ranking work on top of this will not hold.
Scored 0 of 8. Nothing on this page is sent anywhere — the count lives in your browser.
Send us your score and your URL and we'll confirm which failures actually matter for your category.
Send my scoreHow the technical work runs
Week 1
Full crawl and audit
Site crawled, Search Console coverage reviewed, Core Web Vitals measured on mobile, schema validated against your profile.
Weeks 2–3
Blockers first
Anything preventing indexing gets fixed before anything else — blocked pages, stray noindex tags, broken canonicals, orphaned pages.
Weeks 3–5
Speed and structure
Image compression, render-blocking resources, navigation depth, and duplicate page consolidation.
Ongoing
Monitoring
Coverage and Core Web Vitals watched monthly, because rebuilds and plugin updates reintroduce these problems regularly.
What a clean technical score won't do
Worth being clear about, because technical SEO is often sold as the whole answer.
It won't create demand
Technical work removes obstacles between pages that already deserve to rank and the people searching. If those pages don't exist, nothing changes.
It won't build prominence
Reviews, citations, and local links are what make you prominent in your area. None of that is a technical problem.
It won't fix thin content
A fast, perfectly indexed page that says nothing specific still won't rank for a competitive local term.
It isn't a one-off
Plugin updates, redesigns, and CMS migrations reintroduce indexing and speed problems. It needs checking, not fixing once.
It rarely needs a rebuild
Most findings are repairable in place. Be sceptical of anyone whose technical audit concludes with a quote for a new website.
It's not where most budgets should start
If you score six or better on the audit above, your next spend is almost certainly on-page or off-page instead.
Technical SEO questions local businesses ask
What is technical SEO in local SEO?
Technical SEO covers everything that determines whether search engines can crawl, render, index, and understand your site — speed, mobile usability, indexing, site structure, and structured data. Locally it also covers whether your site backs up your Google Business Profile through matching business details and valid LocalBusiness schema.
Does site speed affect local rankings?
Yes, though less directly than people assume. Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal, but the bigger effect is conversion: local searches happen disproportionately on phones, often with immediate intent. A slow page loses the customer before ranking comes into it.
Do I need LocalBusiness schema on every page?
On your homepage and every location page, yes. Service pages benefit from Service schema referencing the business. What matters most is that it's accurate and consistent with your Google Business Profile — contradictory markup does more harm than none at all.
How do I know if my pages are indexed?
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and count what comes back, then check Search Console's Pages report for the authoritative answer including why anything was excluded. Do this after any rebuild — dropped indexing is one of the most common and costly post-launch problems.
Do I need a website rebuild to fix technical SEO?
Usually not. Most of what we find is repairable in place: indexing blocks, missing or wrong schema, duplicate pages, orphaned location pages, uncompressed images. A rebuild is warranted when the platform itself prevents fixing these, which is rarer than agencies proposing rebuilds suggest.
How does technical SEO relate to the rest of local SEO?
Technical work removes obstacles; it doesn't create demand. A perfect audit on a site with no service pages and no reviews changes nothing. It runs alongside on-page and off-page work — on our Fiji engagement the technical repairs and the on-page rebuild both happened in months two and three, and neither would have produced the movement alone.
Book a free technical SEO audit
We'll crawl your site, check indexing and Core Web Vitals, validate your schema against your Google Business Profile, and give you the fixes in priority order. No charge and no obligation.