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James Thompson
Illustration of a site architecture diagram with a speed gauge

Technical SEO

Fix the foundations, and every other optimization works harder

Great content can't rank on a site search engines struggle to crawl, render or load. Technical SEO is the unglamorous work that makes everything else possible — and it's where I started, back when I was building sitemaps for World Vision Canada.

What a technical engagement covers

Crawl & indexation

Full-site crawls to find orphan pages, redirect chains, duplicate templates, thin pages and everything quietly eating your crawl budget.

Core Web Vitals & speed

LCP, INP and CLS diagnosed against real field data — image strategy, render-blocking resources, font loading, caching and payload trimming.

Site architecture

URL structure, internal linking and hierarchy designed so authority flows to the pages that earn revenue.

Migrations & replatforms

Redirect mapping, parity checks and post-launch monitoring. The single highest-risk moment in a site's SEO life, handled carefully.

Rendering & JavaScript SEO

Making sure what Googlebot renders matches what users see — critical for SPAs, headless builds and client-side content.

International & local

Hreflang, canonical strategy, and the local citation and Google Business Profile work that decides multi-location visibility.

Speed is a feature, not an afterthought

This very site is built the way I'd build yours: server-rendered, minimal JavaScript, edge-delivered, with fonts and images tuned so the first paint arrives fast.

  • Server-rendered HTML so content is in the first response, not painted in later by JavaScript
  • Explicit image dimensions and modern formats to eliminate layout shift
  • Preconnect and font-display swap so text is readable immediately
  • Minimal client-side JavaScript — every kilobyte is justified
  • Edge delivery and caching so time-to-first-byte stays low worldwide
  • Semantic, accessible HTML that both crawlers and screen readers parse cleanly

Technical SEO questions

Why does page speed matter so much for SEO?

Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking signal, and speed drives conversion rate independently of rankings. A page that renders in under a second gets crawled more efficiently, converts better, and gives every other optimization a higher ceiling.

What tools do you use for technical audits?

Screaming Frog for crawling, Google Search Console for index and Core Web Vitals field data, Semrush and Moz for competitive and link context, plus PageSpeed Insights and server logs where available.

Can you work directly with our developers?

Yes — that's usually the fastest path. I write requirements in the language your engineers work in and I can read and debug HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP myself.

Looking for an SEO lead — on contract or on payroll?

Whether you need a consultant to fix search performance or an in-house SEO analyst hire who can manage and monitor it long term, reach out and let's chat.