What to know before hiring a technical SEO agency

Technical SEO is the infrastructure layer search engines rely on to crawl, render, and understand a site: structured data, clean URL architecture, sitemaps, canonical tags, and rendering that works whether the crawler executes JavaScript or not.

Core Web Vitals sit in this bucket too. Google uses page speed and stability as a ranking signal directly, so slow, janky pages are a technical SEO problem before they're a content problem.

It's easy to confuse this with content SEO (keyword research, on-page copy) or off-page SEO (backlinks, digital PR). Those matter, but they're a different discipline. A site can be perfectly optimized on-page and still lose visibility because Google can't crawl or render it properly.

Ranking guarantees are the clearest red flag. No agency controls Google's algorithm, so a promised position is a sales tactic, not a technical claim.

Ask whether they can implement fixes or only report them. Plenty of "technical SEO audits" are a 40-page PDF of issues with no one on the other end who can actually ship the fix. You're left hiring a second team to execute what the first team found.

Check whether their own site holds up to the standard they're selling. A technical SEO agency whose own site is slow, missing structured data, or invisible in search results is telling you something about what you'd actually get.

Transparent reporting matters more than jargon. If every update is "we're optimizing," with no specifics on what changed or what moved, that's a sign the work isn't being tracked closely.

Do they work with your actual stack? Technical SEO on a React/Next.js app, a headless CMS, or a WordPress site all require different fixes. Generic advice doesn't always translate into a working implementation.

Is it a one-time audit or ongoing work? Technical SEO isn't a single fix-and-forget project; new pages, new features, and platform updates keep introducing new issues.

Who owns the fixes afterward? If the agency writes the recommendations but your dev team has to implement them, get clear on how much of that gap they'll actually close.

Ask for real, verifiable examples, not just anonymized "client results" screenshots, but sites you can visit and inspect yourself.

We don't sell technical SEO as a standalone audit product. It's part of the build from the first commit on every project. Structured data, clean URLs, sitemaps, and Core Web Vitals are launch requirements, not a follow-up engagement.

Teoraspace, an SEO and AI-search visibility agency, hired us specifically to build their own site to the same technical SEO standard they sell to their clients, so their site would be the proof, not just the pitch.

Seoul Homes came to us running on WordPress, unable to fix underlying technical SEO issues within that platform's constraints. We rebuilt it fully custom on a dedicated server and database, which is what let the technical fixes actually stick.

This site runs the same standard we build for clients: structured data across every page, Core Web Vitals optimized for mobile, hreflang set up correctly across languages, and IndexNow wired in for faster discovery. You're welcome to view source and check.