Technical SEO company: what to check before you hire

Agencies with a verified published price

How to hire for technical work

1. Get the symptom stated as a measurement. Indexed pages falling, impressions flat while positions hold, or a traffic step change on a launch date. A company that starts by asking which measurement moved, and when, is diagnosing; one that starts with a package is selling.
2. Ask for the audit format before you buy it. A useful audit is a ranked list of findings with the evidence for each, the expected effect, and the implementation cost in engineering hours. A spreadsheet exported from a crawler with a hundred equal-weight items is not a diagnosis.
3. Establish who implements. Most technical findings need a developer. Decide whether the company ships code, works inside your repository, or hands specifications to your team, and price the engagement on that answer rather than on the audit alone.
4. Check rendering competence explicitly. Google crawls, then renders with a headless browser, then indexes. Ask how the company tests what the rendered HTML contains and how it handles routing, status codes and canonicals in a JavaScript application.
5. Verify the company from its own pages. Named engineers, published address, printed prices, and case studies that name a client, a change and a measured outcome. Everything in this index is listed on those checks and nothing else.

The failures a technical engagement usually finds

Migrations account for a large share of them. Google recommends server-side permanent redirects from old URLs to new, prefers 301 or 308 where technically possible, and asks that an updated sitemap be submitted so the new URLs are discovered; it also warns that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks or more before the new URLs are shown instead of the old ones. The recurring mistakes it names are development noindex tags left in place, redirects pointing at URLs that do not exist, and sitemaps that were never updated.

The other common family is rendering. Google's JavaScript guidance names fragment-based routing that Googlebot cannot reliably resolve, soft 404s in client-rendered applications where meaningful status codes are impractical, and canonical URLs rewritten in JavaScript to something other than the one specified. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering is Google's own recommendation, and it notes that it makes a site faster for users and crawlers alike.

What technical work can and cannot do

Technical work removes obstacles; it does not create demand. Google's page experience guidance says its core ranking systems look to reward content providing a good page experience, while adding that good results in those reports do not guarantee top rankings and that Search always seeks to show the most relevant content even where the experience is sub-par. Its documentation also states that it does not guarantee that it will crawl, index or serve a page, even one that follows Search Essentials.

So the honest sales pitch for technical SEO is recovery and headroom rather than growth on its own. If a site is being crawled properly and still not ranking, the next constraint is the content and the authority behind it, and a company that says so instead of selling another technical phase is one worth keeping.

Judging the engagement after it ships

Technical fixes have observable consequences on a short timescale: pages moving out of an excluded state, rendered HTML containing the content it should, redirects resolving in one hop, sitemaps matching canonical URLs. Agree those checks before work starts and run them yourself afterwards, since they need no privileged access and no trust.

Reporting should show the count of affected URLs, not a summary adjective. A company confident in its work will happily be measured this way, and one that resists is telling you which part of the engagement was decorative.

Questions people actually ask

What does a technical SEO company do that an agency does not?

It specialises in crawling, rendering, indexing and site architecture, and it usually works alongside engineers rather than writers. Many full-service agencies subcontract exactly this work, so ask who actually performs it.

How much does a technical SEO audit cost?

Audits are commonly sold as fixed-price projects, with implementation quoted separately by engineering effort. The companies in this index that print their fees are the fair reference points; ask each finalist to price the same named deliverable.

Will fixing technical issues raise our rankings?

It can remove what is holding a site back, but it creates no demand by itself. Google's own guidance notes that good scores in its reports do not guarantee top rankings and that relevance is what Search is trying to serve.

Do we need this before a site rebuild or after?

Before. A redirect map, a URL inventory and a rendering plan agreed before launch cost far less than a recovery afterwards, and Google warns that a move can take weeks or longer to settle even when done correctly.

Browse agencies by specialty

• SEO agencies with verified facts
• PPC agencies with verified facts
• Social media agencies with verified facts
• Content marketing agencies with verified facts
• Email marketing agencies with verified facts
• Performance marketing agencies with verified facts