A What question

What technical services does an SEO company provide?

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Technical SEO covers the work on a site’s infrastructure, as opposed to its words or its links, and the clearest way to see what it includes is to start from Google’s own minimum. Google’s technical requirements for Search list three conditions for a page to be eligible for indexing: “Googlebot isn’t blocked.” “The page works, meaning that Google receives an HTTP 200 (success) status code.” “The page has indexable content.” Technical services can be grouped by which of these three they secure, with a further group for how pages perform once they are eligible. Google adds a caution that frames all of it: meeting the requirements “doesn’t mean that a page will be indexed; indexing isn’t guaranteed.”

Making sure Google can find and reach the pages

This group covers everything that decides whether Googlebot can discover a page and is allowed to fetch it. A company reviews the robots.txt file so it does not block sections that should appear in search, checks that the XML sitemap lists current pages and nothing broken or excluded, and looks at internal links so that important pages are not left without any link pointing to them. On larger sites it may also study server logs to see which pages Googlebot actually requests.

Google points to two reports for this work and recommends using both: “To see a list of pages that are inaccessible to Google (but that you would like to see in Search results), use both the Page Indexing report and Crawl Stats report in Search Console.” It adds: “Each report may contain different information about your URLs, so it’s a good idea to look at both reports.” A technical review that relies on only one of them has a gap.

Making sure the pages work

Google states: “Google only indexes pages that are served with an HTTP 200 (success) status code.” It adds: “Client and server error pages aren’t indexed.” The services in this group deal with what a page returns when it is requested: broken links and missing pages, server errors, redirects that chain through several steps or loop back on themselves, and the move of the whole site to HTTPS. When pages have moved, the company maps old addresses to new ones so that visitors and search engines reach the right page.

Making sure the content can be indexed

A page that loads can still fail at the last step. Google’s definition of indexable content starts with this: “The textual content is in a file type that Google Search supports.” The content must also not violate Google’s spam policies. The technical services here include checking how pages built with JavaScript render, so that the content and links a visitor sees are also present for Google; finding noindex rules on pages that should be indexed; and handling duplicate versions of the same page with canonical tags so that one version is chosen deliberately.

The same page draws a distinction worth checking in any technical review: “While blocking Googlebot with a robots.txt file will prevent crawling, a page’s URL might still appear in search results. To instruct Google not to index a page, use noindex and allow Google to crawl the URL.” Mixing up the two can leave pages missing from search, or showing in search when they should not.

Beyond eligibility

Once pages can be indexed, technical work turns to how they perform and how they appear. This includes page speed and the Core Web Vitals measurements, the mobile version of the site that Google uses for indexing, and structured data that describes the content of a page in a form search engines can read. Each of these is a specialty of its own, and a company should be able to tell you which it handles itself and which it passes to your developers.

What the work looks like when you buy it

A technical engagement starts with an audit that lists the issues found under each of these groups, ranked by how much they affect the site, with the pages affected. Some fixes the company can make itself; others need your developer or your platform’s settings, so ask who will implement each one. Because sites change with every update, plugin, and new page, ask too what the company will monitor after the first round of fixes, and how you will hear about new problems.

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