Technical SEO & Site Architecture

Indexation comes before everything else

The first question a technical audit answers is not how well a site ranks but whether search engines can find, crawl and index it at all. A page that is not indexed cannot rank for anything, and the causes are usually invisible from the front end: a stray noindex directive, a canonical tag pointing somewhere unintended, a robots.txt rule that blocks more than it was meant to, a site served on two hostnames with no redirect between them so every page exists twice.

These are unglamorous problems and they are also the ones that most often explain why a well-built, well-written site produces nothing. We check them first, in Search Console against the live site, before recommending a single content change.

What the audit covers

Crawl and indexation: coverage and exclusion reasons in Search Console, robots and sitemap correctness, canonical consistency, hostname and protocol duplication, orphaned and thin pages.

Structure and rendering: URL hierarchy, internal linking and where authority actually flows, redirect chains and loops, pagination, and whether content is present in the served HTML or only appears after JavaScript runs.

Performance: Core Web Vitals measured on real pages rather than a single homepage score, render-blocking resources, image delivery, and the mobile experience specifically, since that is what Google measures.

Structured data: whether Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Breadcrumb and Article markup exist, validate, and describe the business accurately — which matters increasingly for AI answer engines trying to identify who a company is.

What this site scores, since you are about to ask

It is fair to expect a firm selling technical SEO and performance to publish its own numbers, so here they are, measured on this site’s homepage: time to first byte around 310ms, largest contentful paint around 1.6 seconds, 344KB transferred across 26 requests. Google’s "good" threshold for largest contentful paint is 2.5 seconds.

Two honest caveats. These are lab measurements from a single run on a good connection, not Core Web Vitals field data gathered from real visitors over 28 days — field data is the number that actually counts for ranking, and it needs traffic to accumulate. And a fast site is a floor, not a strategy: plenty of quick sites rank for nothing. It does mean that when we tell you performance is costing you rankings, we have done the work on our own site first.

Why engineering background matters here

Technical SEO sits at the boundary between marketing and software, and most agencies staff it from the marketing side. Drift Strategy Group was founded out of fifteen-plus years in enterprise technology — web and mobile application development, data warehousing, data engineering, and leading data science teams — which means the audit findings come with the ability to actually implement them rather than a PDF handed to whoever built your site.

It also means the recommendations are prioritised by expected impact and implementation cost rather than listed as an undifferentiated checklist of two hundred items. You can read more about that background on the About page.