Technical SEO services are paid work that makes sure search engines can crawl, render and index your site: fixing indexing errors, duplicate URLs, redirects, page speed, JavaScript rendering, structured data and site architecture. They are sold as a one-off audit (most project fees fall between $500 and $5,000), an audit plus implementation, a monthly retainer, or hourly consulting (most commonly $75 to $150 an hour, per Ahrefs' survey of 439 providers). Small sites can often skip the service and use free tools; large, JavaScript-heavy or international sites usually can't.
Below: exactly what a technical SEO service should include, how each package is priced, how to compare providers, and the tools you can use instead.
Key takeaways
- A technical SEO service covers crawling, indexing, rendering, speed, structured data and site structure. Content and links are separate services.
- Project fees cluster at $500 to $2,000 (66% of agencies, SE Ranking); consultants most often charge $5,001 to $10,000 per project and $100 to $150 an hour (Ahrefs).
- Start in Google Search Console's Indexing → Pages report: every reason a page isn't indexed is listed there for free.
- Core Web Vitals targets are LCP ≤ 2.5 s, INP ≤ 200 ms and CLS ≤ 0.1 at the 75th percentile. INP replaced FID in 2024; a provider still quoting FID is out of date.
- Google's crawl budget guide is written for sites with roughly 1 million+ pages, 10,000+ pages changing daily, or many "Discovered - currently not indexed" URLs. Be wary of a crawl-budget project for a 50-page site.
What are technical SEO services?
Technical SEO is the part of SEO that deals with how search engines access and process your site, rather than what the pages say (on-page SEO) or who links to them (off-page SEO). A technical SEO service finds the problems, explains their impact and either fixes them or writes tickets your developers can ship.
A complete service covers these areas:
- Crawling: robots.txt, internal links, orphan pages, redirect chains, server errors, crawl traps such as infinite filter URLs.
- Indexing: canonical tags, noindex tags, duplicate and near-duplicate pages, XML sitemaps, the Search Console page indexing report.
- Rendering: whether Google sees the content of JavaScript-built pages (React, Vue, Angular, headless CMSs).
- Page experience: Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, HTTPS, intrusive interstitials.
- Structured data: schema markup for products, articles, organizations, local businesses, reviews and breadcrumbs, validated in Google's Rich Results Test.
- Architecture: URL structure, click depth, faceted navigation, pagination, internal linking between related pages.
- International: hreflang tags, country and language targeting, duplicate content across regions.
- Migrations: redirect maps, pre-launch checks and post-launch monitoring when you change domain, CMS or URL structure.
- AI crawler access: whether robots.txt and your CDN allow the crawlers behind ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Google's AI features to read your pages.
Technical SEO solutions: problems, symptoms and fixes
Most technical problems show up in Google Search Console before anywhere else. This is what a good service looks for, and what the fix usually is.
| Problem | Where you see it | Typical fix |
|---|---|---|
| Pages Google won't index | Indexing → Pages: "Crawled - currently not indexed" | Merge or improve thin pages, add internal links, remove near-duplicates (our fix guide) |
| Duplicate URLs | "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" | Canonical tags, redirect or noindex parameter and filter URLs |
| Pages blocked by mistake | "Blocked by robots.txt", "Excluded by 'noindex' tag" | Correct robots.txt rules or meta robots tags, often left over from staging |
| Slow pages | Experience → Core Web Vitals: "Poor URLs" | Resize and lazy-load images, cut unused JavaScript, cache, fix server response time |
| Content invisible to Google | URL Inspection → View crawled page shows little HTML | Server-side rendering or pre-rendering for key templates |
| Broken links and redirect chains | "Not found (404)", "Page with redirect" | Redirect map, update internal links to final URLs |
| Missing rich results | Enhancements reports with errors | Fix required schema properties; test in the Rich Results Test |
| Wasted crawling on large sites | "Discovered - currently not indexed" in volume | Block crawl traps, prune low-value URLs, improve internal linking |
Two dated claims to watch for in proposals. Core Web Vitals now measure INP (Interaction to Next Paint), which replaced FID in 2024; the good thresholds are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 ms or less and CLS of 0.1 or less. And FAQ rich results have been shown only for "well-known, authoritative government and health websites" since Google's August 2023 change, so adding FAQ schema will not earn most sites a rich result.
Technical SEO packages and pricing
Technical SEO is sold in five shapes. Prices are survey ranges, not quotes: site size, platform and whether the provider implements fixes move them a lot.
| Engagement | What you get | Typical price |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly consulting | Answers, reviews of developer work, troubleshooting a drop | $75 to $100 an hour is the most common bracket overall; consultants most often charge $100 to $150 (Ahrefs) |
| One-off technical audit | Crawl, Search Console review, prioritized issue list | 66% of agencies price projects at $500 to $2,000; 18% charge over $3,000 (SE Ranking) |
| Audit plus implementation | The audit, then fixes shipped in your CMS or tickets for your developers | Project rates plus developer hours; $2,501 to $5,000 is the most common project bracket in Ahrefs' data |
| Monthly technical retainer | Monitoring, fixes as they appear, release checks | Retainers most often run $501 to $1,000 a month; consultants average $3,250 |
| Migration or enterprise project | Redirect mapping, staging checks, launch support, log analysis | On the Moz Recommended List, 47 of 63 agencies list a minimum engagement of $5,000 or more |
Why the spread is so wide: a 30-page WordPress site can be audited in an afternoon with a desktop crawler. A 2-million-URL e-commerce site with faceted navigation, several languages and a JavaScript front end needs log files, segmentation and weeks of work. Google's own crawl budget guide is written for sites with roughly 1 million+ pages, or 10,000+ pages that change daily. If your site is smaller, you are paying for indexing and quality fixes, not crawl budget work.
Technical SEO consulting vs agencies vs in-house
Consultants are best for diagnosis and hard problems: traffic drops, migrations, JavaScript rendering, international setups. Most advise rather than implement, so you need developer time.
Agencies sell packages that bundle the audit, implementation support and monthly reporting. Good when you have no developer and want one throat to choke. Check who actually does the technical work; it is often one specialist shared across many accounts.
In-house makes sense when releases ship weekly and SEO regressions are frequent. A technical SEO who sits with the developers catches a stray noindex before it goes live, which no external audit can.
If you are weighing the wider question of what to hand off, our guide to outsourcing SEO includes a cost calculator for in-house vs retainer.
Alternatives to technical SEO services: tools you can run yourself
For small and mid-sized sites, the most common alternative to a technical SEO service is a crawler plus Search Console and a few hours of your developer's time. These are the main options, with prices from each vendor's site in October 2026.
Technical SEO tools you can use instead of a service (October 2026)
| Google Search Console | Google's own reports | Free | ✓ | Indexing reasons, Core Web Vitals field data, URL Inspection |
| PageSpeed Insights | Speed test | Free | ✓ | Core Web Vitals for one URL, lab and field data |
| Outrank SEO audit | Online audit | Free | ✓ | Quick technical, on-page and AI-readiness check with a copyable fix prompt |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Desktop crawler | $279 per licence per year | ✓ | Full crawls, custom extraction, redirects; free up to 500 URLs |
| Sitebulb | Desktop and cloud crawler | See pricing page | ✕ | Prioritized hints, crawl maps; Lite 10,000 URLs per audit, Pro 500,000 |
| Ahrefs Site Audit | Cloud crawler in a suite | From $129/mo (Lite, 100,000 crawl credits) | ✓ | Scheduled audits alongside backlink and keyword data; free for your own verified sites via Ahrefs Webmaster Tools |
| Semrush Site Audit | Cloud crawler in a suite | From $139/mo ($117.33 billed yearly) | ✓ | Scheduled audits alongside rank tracking and AI visibility |
| Lumar | Enterprise platform | Quote on request | ✕ | Very large sites, monitoring, team workflows |
| Botify | Enterprise platform | Quote on request | ✕ | Log analysis and crawling at enterprise scale |
Click a column header to sort.
What the tools don't do: prioritize by business impact, write the fix, or ship it. A crawler will happily report 400 "issues" on a healthy site. If your developer can read a crawl export and Search Console, tools are enough. If nobody on the team can tell a harmless warning from a sitewide noindex, buy a one-off audit and keep the tools for monitoring. For a do-it-yourself walk-through, use our technical SEO audit checklist.
Technical SEO for SaaS, software and tech companies
Tech companies get the hardest technical problems because their sites are built by engineers, not marketers:
- JavaScript front ends. Single-page apps can ship nearly empty HTML. Check key templates with URL Inspection and render server-side where it matters.
- Help centers and docs. Support and documentation sites (often on a subdomain or a third-party help desk) answer thousands of long-tail questions. Make sure they are indexable, linked from the main site and not duplicated across versions.
- App and staging URLs. Logged-in app pages, staging environments and preview deployments leak into the index more often than you'd think. Noindex or password-protect them.
- Pricing, changelog and integration pages. High-intent pages that are often blocked, thin or rendered client-side.
Our dedicated guide to technical SEO for SaaS goes through each of these with fixes.
How to compare technical SEO services
The best technical SEO services for crawlability and indexing issues share three habits: they start from your Search Console data rather than a generic crawl, they rank fixes by impact, and they measure the result after the fix ships. Use this checklist on every proposal.
Interactive checklist
Technical SEO service checklist
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Scope
0/4Deliverables
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0/4Your progress is saved in this browser, so you can come back to it later.
Red flags: a fixed-price "200-point audit" with no look at your Search Console, a promise of ranking gains from technical fixes alone, recommendations to add FAQ or HowTo schema for rich results, a crawl budget project for a small site, or a request for write access to Search Console during the audit, which Google's guide to hiring an SEO explicitly advises against.
After the technical fixes: content and links
Technical SEO removes the brakes; it doesn't add the engine. Once Google can crawl and index your pages, rankings depend on pages that match searches and on links from relevant sites. That is the part Outrank automates: keyword research, an SEO article published every day to your CMS, and backlinks placed inside relevant articles on other sites, with 15 verified links a month guaranteed. It does not fix your templates or server, so pair it with an audit if Search Console shows indexing errors. If you want the content side done for you with human editors reviewing every article, see Outrank Agency.
For the broader picture of audits that also cover content and links, see website SEO audit services.
FAQ
What are technical SEO services?
Technical SEO services find and fix the problems that stop search engines from crawling, rendering and indexing your site: indexing errors, duplicate URLs, broken redirects, slow pages, JavaScript rendering, structured data and site architecture. They are usually sold as an audit, an audit plus implementation, a monthly retainer or hourly consulting.
How much do technical SEO services cost?
One-off projects usually cost $500 to $2,000 at smaller agencies (66% of agencies in SE Ranking's survey) and $2,501 to $10,000 with experienced consultants. Hourly consulting most often runs $75 to $150, and monthly retainers most often $501 to $1,000. Migrations and enterprise sites start around $5,000.
What is the difference between technical SEO and on-page SEO?
Technical SEO is about access: whether search engines can crawl, render and index your pages. On-page SEO is about the page itself: titles, headings, content and internal links that match what people search. A page can be technically perfect and still not rank because its content doesn't answer the query.
How often should I get a technical SEO audit?
Once a year for a stable site, and before and after any redesign, CMS change or domain migration. Sites that release code weekly should monitor continuously with Search Console alerts or a scheduled crawl rather than wait for an annual audit.
Can I do technical SEO myself?
On a small site, yes. Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and a crawler like Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) will surface most problems, and many fixes are settings in your CMS. Hire help for JavaScript rendering, international setups, migrations and sites with tens of thousands of URLs.
What does a technical SEO consultant do?
A technical SEO consultant diagnoses crawling, indexing and rendering problems, prioritizes fixes by business impact and works with your developers to ship them. Consultants are typically hired for traffic drops, site migrations, large or JavaScript-heavy sites, and second opinions on agency audits.
