Technical SEO for local SEO.
Most local sites do not have a technical problem. They have two or three specific ones, and until those are cleared, nothing else you pay for can work.
Where it goes wrong
Four things have to be true before your page can show up at all
They happen in order, and a page that fails the first one never gets to the fourth. Almost every technical problem we find is a page stuck at a specific one of these, which is useful, because the fix follows from knowing which.
Before your page can appear, four things have to be true, in this order
- 1
Can Google find the page at all?
It stops here when
- Nothing on your site links to it
- A setting left over from the rebuild tells Google to stay away
- Your hosting times out when Google visits from a phone connection
- 2
Can Google read what is on it?
It stops here when
- Your address and hours are inside a picture
- The details only appear after someone taps something
- The page takes so long to load that Google gives up
- 3
Did Google keep a copy?
It stops here when
- Two of your pages say nearly the same thing, so only one is kept
- The page was marked 'do not keep' during a rebuild and never unmarked
- 4
Is it the best answer to what they typed?
Not a technical question
- Nothing on the three lists above makes a page worth showing
- That is the writing, the reviews and being known locally
Questions one to three are what we fix. Question four is what everything else you pay for is aimed at, and no amount of technical work will answer it. Naming which question your page fails at is most of the audit, because the fix follows from the answer. Speeding up a page Google never found is work you paid for and cannot measure.
The first thing we find
Your website and your Google listing quietly disagree
Every business has a handful of plain facts: name, address, phone, hours, what you do. Google collects them from your site and from your listing and expects the same answer twice. When it gets two, it trusts both a little less, and no checker anywhere will tell you.
What your website says
What your Google listing says
Business name
Northside Plumbing Co
Business name
Northside Plumbing Co
Phone
(07) 3350 1188
Phone
(07) 3350 1188
Address
42 Hamilton Rd, Chermside
Address
42 Hamilton Rd, Chermside
Opening hours
Mon–Fri, 9am–5pm
Opening hours
Open 24 hours
Services
Burst pipes, hot water, drains
Services
Burst pipes, hot water, drains
How this happens to almost everyone
- The hours were typed once, when the site was built
- Four years ago, by a designer, from a note in an email.
- You started taking after-hours calls and updated Google
- Because that is the one you look at. Nobody went back to the website.
- Now the two disagree and Google has to pick
- It trusts a business less when its own two sources contradict each other. Worse, the customer with no hot water at 9pm reads the wrong one and calls somebody else.
Nothing here is broken in a way any checker will report. Both pages are perfectly valid. They simply give two different answers to the same question about your business.
The second thing we find
A page you paid for that nobody can reach
Live, well written, and connected to nothing. It happens after rebuilds, and it happens to area pages more than anything else, because a menu almost never lists every suburb you cover.
Every page on your site, by how many taps it takes to reach it
1 tap from the front page
Checked most often, found most easily
- Services
- Areas we cover
- About
- Contact
2 taps
The pages that should be earning you calls
- Burst pipes
- Hot water
- Blocked drains
- Chermside
- Aspley
3 taps
Visited less, and less often. Keep the money pages out of here
- Chermside → burst pipes
- Older blog posts
No taps. There is no way to reach this page.
It is live, it is well written, and nothing anywhere on your site links to it. The only way in is to already know the address. This happens after rebuilds, and it happens to area pages, because the menu almost never lists them all.
Depth is the easy half of this picture and a menu fixes most of it. The page hanging off the side is the expensive half: it was paid for, it is doing nothing, and nobody notices for months because the site looks fine from the front page.
What this will not do
Worth being direct about, because technical SEO gets sold as the whole answer more often than any other part of this work. Once the way is clear, the gains come from the pages themselves and from reviews, listings and local links.
- It does not give anyone a reason to call you
- This work clears the way between pages that already deserve to be found and the people looking for them. If those pages do not exist yet, a perfect result here changes nothing at all.
- It does not make you better known locally
- Reviews, being listed in the right places and being mentioned by other local organisations decide that, and not one of them is a technical job.
- It is not where most budgets should start
- If your site loads quickly on a phone and Google can already find every page, your next spend is almost certainly on the pages themselves or on your listing. We will say so at the audit rather than selling you the work anyway.
Questions
- What is technical SEO in local SEO?
- Everything that determines whether search engines can crawl, render, index and understand your site: speed, mobile usability, indexing, 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, and a slow page loses the customer before ranking comes into it.
- How do I know if my pages are indexed?
- Search site:yourdomain.com and count what comes back, then open 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 most expensive 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.
- 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 is accurate and consistent with your Google Business Profile, because contradictory markup does more harm than no markup at all.
- How does technical SEO relate to the rest of local SEO?
- It removes obstacles rather than creating demand. A perfect audit on a site with no service pages and no reviews changes nothing. On our Fiji engagement the technical repairs and the on-page rebuild both landed in months two and three, and neither would have produced the movement alone.
Book a free technical SEO audit
We crawl your site, check indexing and Core Web Vitals, validate your schema against your Business Profile, and give you the fixes in priority order. If the answer is that your technical foundation is fine, you get that instead.