Let’s improve your site’s technical foundations (indexability, Core Web Vitals, UX, site architecture, and more) for better engagement and visibility in search results.

Technical SEO is one of the three main buckets of SEO tactics. It’s about making sure Google (and other search engines) can crawl, index, and rank your website content, all while giving users a great experience that earns trust and conversions for your brand.

I follow a people-first approach, where every SEO decision gets made with users in mind. By extension, this benefits your overall business goals. And yes, it applies to technical SEO, as well. 😉

In addition to a firsthand review of your website, I can also use crawler tools, Google (or Bing) developer tools, as well AI tools to create efficiencies or identify issues and opportunities.

Why is having a solid technical foundation important?

Here are a few benefits your website gets from technical SEO help:

Indexability of your content

Googlebot (and other search engine crawlers) need to be able to discover your content, then render it to understand the context and rank it for relevant queries.

Issues that can impact page indexing on Google Search may include:

• Orphan pages
• Canonical tags
• Hreflang setups
• JavaScript (server-side vs. client-side)
• Robots.txt or meta robots tag settings
• Site structure (architecture)
• Content quality

Reviewing the Pages report in Google Search Console can be a great starting place to identify and resolve indexing issues:

Technical issues using site crawl audit tools

There are several 3rd-party SEO crawler tools that can identify technical website issues, including Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and Semrush or Ahrefs site audits. Bing Webmaster Tools also has a free SEO reports (audit) tool in addition to the data from Google Search Console.

Important note: Some SEO tools give scores like “domain authority” or “site health.” These DO NOT matter to Google or any other search engine for your rankings.

Here are two problems I’ve seen related to audit tools:

1. Sales scare tactics – Salespeople at digital agencies, or even unscrupulous freelancers, might try to get your business by running audits and then making site health scores or crawl issues seem more severe or important than they are. The people using audit tools this way usually don’t have the context to understand the findings. Simply fixing site issues to improve a tool score won’t necessarily help your rankings or other SEO KPIs. Whether a technical issue fix will benefit your SEO goals or not depends on the pages impacted and the nature of that impact.
2. Fixing the wrong things – Less experienced marketers can overlook the nuance or context of certain site crawl issues. They might export a default PDF or spreadsheet of all findings and tell you everything needs fixing. I’ve even seen cases where thousands of dollars in development time were wasted fixing site crawl issues that had no discernible impact on rankings, site performance, or the user’s experience.

Please be cautious about taking what a tool tells you at face value, and always consider the motivations of the person giving you information. I never want anyone to be taken advantage of, so whether you’re a client of mine, or I can refer you to a specialist for your site, I want to ensure you get the most mileage out of your SEO budget.

Here’s how I can help with respect to crawler tools:

Audit tool findings should be investigated and prioritized by an SEO based on the business cases for resolving them. If you receive a raw PDF or spreadsheet exported from a tool from an SEO services provider with no context, be careful about trusting their guidance.

I have years of experience running site crawls on websites, analyzing the findings (usually by cross-referencing multiple tools), and then prioritizing issues (with instructions for next steps) based on business goals. I can run site audits for you and create a spreadsheet with instructions and tabs for findings. This can be done one time or as part of a monthly monitoring task.

Or, if your team already uses SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to schedule site crawls, I can look at the exported findings and prioritize what to fix and ignore to get the most efficient results from your developer or marketing team’s time.

Website migrations and launches (SEO guidance)

If you’re planning on:

• Launching a new website
• Redesigning your website
• Switching your CMS
• Changing your domain name
• Merging several websites together

You’ll want SEO guidance before, during, and after that migration or launch happens.

Over the years, I’ve seen site migrations where a brand switched from, say, WordPress to Shopify, but lost a good amount of their keyword rankings and organic traffic because they didn’t plan or follow a migration checklist for pre- and post-launch SEO steps.

I’ve contributed to many successful website migrations in my career, including mergers where multiple websites joined into one domain, domain migrations where a website changed its name, and partial or full website redesigns, including my own (which included recovering content and traffic after a hack, likely due to my old hosting provider’s error).

I’ve also witnessed some messy migrations, which usually happen when SEO guidance isn’t followed or the SEO is brought in too late.

Whether you’re launching a new website or planning a migration, I can put together a checklist for the team to follow before and after the launch, accounting for 301 redirects, content adjustments, on-page signals, and monitoring of page indexing, keyword rankings, and organic traffic afterward.

If you recently launched, migrated, or redesigned your website and lost organic traffic or keyword rankings, I can also perform an audit to help you recover as much of your historical SEO performance as possible. Just remember, the faster we act, the better!

Core Web Vitals and page experience

Many site owners or marketers are familiar with Google’s Core Web Vitals because they are a purported ranking factor. However, CWVs have always been a small contributor to rankings, usually just used like a tie breaker between similar sites.

I’ve never viewed CWVs in the context of “rankings” so much as contributing to an overall good page experience for users, which has downstream effects on search performance.

Having a good website page experience includes:

• Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, and INP)
• HTTPS (security)
• Mobile-friendliness
• Content structure
• Minimal distractions (pop-ups or ads)

We’ve learned that user engagement signals play a role in how Google may rank its search results. It’s important to not only look at your page’s content, but also the speed, stability, and clarity with which it’s presented to satisfy users.

Holistic website audits & SEO strategies

My background is doing in-depth technical, content, and competitor audits, creating lists of opportunities, and then prioritizing them into a long-term SEO strategy that builds brand awareness, qualified organic traffic, and conversions to earn sustainable revenue for businesses.

I can offer technical SEO audits by themselves and then either create instructions for how to resolve the issues and findings or assist with that work directly myself.

Alternatively, I can make technical SEO part of a larger strategy as part of my services. Ultimately, my goal as a consultant is to help you stretch every dollar of your digital marketing budget to get the maximum benefits possible from SEO.

How much do I charge?

My technical SEO services can be priced in a few different ways. I can charge for an audit or full project or each milestone in that project . This breaks down to around $150 per hour.

I use Screaming Frog and Ahrefs Site Audit by default, but I can also charge at-cost for the use of any extra or specialized tools, as needed for your project.

A little about me

I’m an independent consultant based in Orlando, Florida, who previously worked for 8+ years at digital agencies, focusing on SEO strategies, implementation and oversight of the work, and reporting on results. I offer SEO services under my company, Ethan Lazuk Consulting, LLC, remotely anywhere in the U.S. or internationally or in person in the greater Orlando area.

My knowledge of technical SEO is based on years of experience doing site audits and migration projects for clients of different sizes and tech stacks, including investigating findings and working independently or collaboratively with developers or marketers to resolve issues.

I’ve also created site audit SOPs for agencies that list SEO crawl tool issues and explain how their internal teams can prioritize and fix them.

Thank you for your interest and support!

For more information, feel free to visit the case studies area of my blog to find examples of websites with technical issues.

You can also find me on social media, where I regularly post and share tips or information:

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• Instagram
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Mail

Cheers!