Technical SEO

Fast, crawlable, indexed

Technical SEO makes sure search engines can reach your pages, understand them, and serve them fast enough that guests do not leave first. It is the least visible work I do and usually the highest leverage.

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Largest contentful paint
Before4.2s
After1.1s

Who this is for

  • Your site takes four seconds to show anything on a phone, which is where most of your traffic is.
  • Search Console reports pages as "Discovered - currently not indexed" and nobody has explained why.
  • Your booking engine loads in an iframe and you have no idea whether Google sees your room rates.
Crawl visualisationClient example
Screaming Frog crawl visualisation of a hotel website, with 41 room and area pages sitting unlinked outside the main crawl treeCrawl visualisation900 × 500
A crawl of a 94-page hotel site. The cluster on the right is 41 pages reachable only through a JavaScript menu, so Google never crawled them.
What is included

Six things, all of them concrete

Core Web Vitals

LCP, CLS and INP measured on real mobile connections, then fixed at the cause: usually images, render-blocking scripts and third-party booking widgets.

Crawl & index audit

A full Screaming Frog crawl checked against Search Console coverage to find what is blocked, duplicated, redirect-chained or quietly noindexed.

Site architecture

URL structure, internal linking and navigation, so every page is reachable in three clicks and no page is an orphan.

Structured data

Hotel, Restaurant, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList and Article markup, validated in the Rich Results Test rather than assumed to work.

Third-party script control

Booking engines, chat widgets and analytics audited for weight and blocking behaviour. Most properties carry 300KB they get nothing from.

Monitoring

Search Console and field CrUX data checked monthly, so regressions get caught in weeks rather than at the next annual audit.

Timeline

What happens, and when

Speed fixes show in lab data immediately, but field data (the numbers Google actually uses) needs 28 days of real traffic to update. Index recovery is usually visible in 2-6 weeks.

  1. Week 1

    Crawl, field data pull, prioritised issue list with the expected impact of each item.

  2. Week 2-4

    Fixes deployed in priority order, each measured before the next one starts.

  3. Week 5-8

    Re-crawl, index recovery tracking, structured data validation.

FAQ

Technical SEO: common questions

Does site speed actually affect hotel bookings?

Yes, on two fronts. It is a confirmed ranking input, and it changes behaviour directly, because mobile visitors abandon slow pages before they ever see a rate. On one property, cutting LCP from 4.2s to 1.1s coincided with a 34% drop in mobile bounce rate over the following 60 days.

My site was built on Wix or Squarespace. Can it still be fixed?

Mostly yes. Image handling, heading structure, internal links, schema and third-party scripts are fixable on any platform. What you cannot fix is the platform floor. If the builder ships 900KB of JavaScript on every page, no amount of tuning reaches a 1s LCP, and at that point a rebuild is the honest recommendation.

Why are my pages not being indexed?

Usually one of four things: they are blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag, they duplicate a page Google already has, they are orphaned with no internal links pointing at them, or the site is slow enough that Google has throttled its crawl. Search Console coverage data tells you which one in about ten minutes.

Do I need schema markup on a small restaurant site?

Yes, and it matters more for a small site than a large one. You do not have the brand authority that lets Google guess correctly about you, so structured data is how you remove the ambiguity: what you serve, your hours, your price range, your location.

Can you work with my existing web developer?

Yes, and it is usually the fastest route. I deliver a prioritised issue list with the reasoning and expected impact for each item, your developer implements it, and I re-test after deployment to confirm what actually changed.

Also worth reading: what this costs · the blog

Free audit

Want to know what is holding your property back?

Send me your website and I will reply within one business day with the two or three things I would fix first. No call required, no obligation.

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