What is technical SEO and what does it include?
Technical SEO is the practice of making a website easy for search engines and AI crawlers to access, render, understand, and trust. It includes crawlability and indexation management, site speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, structured data, canonicalization, redirects, XML sitemaps, and internationalization. It is distinct from content and links: technical SEO does not create demand, it removes the ceiling on everything else. A technically broken site wastes every dollar spent on content. Our service covers the full stack, from server response headers to schema graphs, executed by people who read code — not checklist tools.
A common mistake is fixing whatever a crawl tool flags as 'errors' in order of severity label rather than actual traffic impact — a orphaned page with zero organic visits does not deserve the same priority as a canonical error on a top revenue page. A practical rule: cross-reference every flagged issue against Search Console's performance data before touching anything.
How much does a technical SEO audit cost?
A professional technical SEO audit costs $1,000–$3,000 at Meek Media depending on site size; enterprise audits elsewhere run $5,000–$30,000. The deliverable is not a PDF of tool exports — it is a prioritized fix list with impact estimates, exact implementation instructions, and a walkthrough call with your developers. For sites under ~500 pages we usually bundle audit and implementation together from $2,000, because finding problems without fixing them helps nobody. Ongoing technical management, including monitoring and release-regression checks, runs $1,000–$2,500/month.
A decision rule worth using: request a fixed-scope quote only after the audit exists, never before, since audit findings on an unfamiliar site can swing implementation cost by 2–3x. Sites under roughly 500 pages with clean CMS architecture typically land at the lower end of any quoted range; sprawling legacy sites with custom code land at the top.
Why is my site not being indexed by Google?
The most common causes, in order: noindex tags or robots.txt rules left over from staging; pages orphaned with no internal links; crawl budget wasted on parameter and filter URLs; canonical tags pointing to the wrong page; and thin or duplicate content Google chooses not to index ("Crawled — currently not indexed" in Search Console). JavaScript-rendered content adds another failure mode — if content only exists after client-side rendering, both Google and AI crawlers may never see it. Our audit reads your Search Console coverage report, server logs, and rendered-vs-raw HTML to pinpoint which of these applies, then fixes it.
A common mistake is trusting the Google-selected canonical shown in Search Console without checking whether it matches your intended canonical — Google sometimes overrides a stated preference when it judges two pages too similar. According to Google's own documentation, this override is common on faceted or parameter-heavy URLs, which is exactly where ecommerce and filter-heavy sites run into silent indexation loss.
Does site speed really affect rankings and AI citations?
Yes, twice over. For Google, Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking signal and a large conversion lever — a mobile page going from 4s to 1.5s LCP routinely lifts conversions double digits. For AI engines the effect is harsher: ChatGPT's crawler operates with roughly a 2-second timeout, and field data shows pages with first-contentful-paint under 0.4 seconds earn about 3x more citations (6.7 vs 2.1 per study of 216k pages). Speed has quietly become an admission requirement for AI visibility, not a tiebreaker. We optimize to green Web Vitals and sub-second first paint where the stack allows.
A practical decision rule: test your homepage's Largest Contentful Paint on a throttled mobile connection, not just desktop broadband, since that is the condition most real visitors and many crawlers actually experience. According to Google's Core Web Vitals data, mobile LCP commonly runs 2–3x slower than desktop on the same page, which is where most sites silently fail the threshold.
What is AI-crawler readiness and do I need it?
AI-crawler readiness means your site serves the machine-readable signals answer engines look for: a robots.txt that explicitly allows citation-driving bots like OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Claude-SearchBot (many sites accidentally block them with stale rules), llms.txt as an agent-friendly index, Content-Signal headers declaring usage policy, and — critically — content visible in raw server-rendered HTML rather than assembled by JavaScript. Most robots.txt files were written before these bots existed; a quarterly re-audit is now standard hygiene. We include the full agent layer in every technical engagement, because it is cheap to build and expensive to lack.
A common mistake is treating llms.txt as a citation lever it currently is not, while leaving robots.txt rules written years ago still blocking legitimate citation bots by accident. A practical check: audit robots.txt line by line against the current list of named search-and-fetch bots quarterly, since stale disallow rules are the single most common cause of AI-crawler invisibility we find.
