What is technical SEO, and what does a technical SEO freelancer own?
Technical SEO is everything that sits between your content and a search engine understanding it. Your pages can be well written and still invisible if crawlers cannot reach them, if the server returns the wrong status code, if JavaScript hides the text, or if ten slightly different URLs compete for the same page.
A technical SEO freelancer owns four layers. Discovery: can search engines find your URLs through links and sitemaps? Crawling: are they allowed and able to fetch them efficiently? Rendering and indexing: once fetched, does the page produce the content and signals you intend, and does Google choose to index it? Presentation: do structured data, titles and page experience help the result look good and load well?
Content strategy and link building are neighbouring fields. They matter, but when the foundations are broken, they are expensive ways to paper over the cracks.
- Discovery: internal links, XML sitemaps, navigation
- Crawling: robots.txt, status codes, redirects, server response
- Rendering and indexing: JavaScript, canonicals, noindex, duplication
- Presentation: structured data, titles, Core Web Vitals, mobile experience
Signs you need a technical SEO freelancer rather than more content
Publishing more pages does not help if the ones you already have are not being indexed. A few patterns usually point to a technical cause.
- Search Console shows many pages as “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Discovered – currently not indexed”
- Traffic dropped sharply right after a redesign, domain change or platform switch
- Google shows the wrong URL for your pages, such as a parameter version or the old domain
- Your site is built in React or another JavaScript framework and important pages show little text in a raw HTML fetch
- Filter and sort pages on a store have exploded into thousands of URLs
- Core Web Vitals in Search Console show “Poor” for mobile
- Rich results you used to get have disappeared, or schema reports errors
One or two of these on a small site can often be fixed in days. Several at once on a large site usually means architecture work, and that is where a technical SEO freelancer who can also write code saves a round of handoffs.
What should a technical SEO audit include?
A useful audit answers three questions: what is broken, how much does it matter, and exactly how to fix it. A 200-row spreadsheet of warnings from a tool answers none of them.
Our audits start from Google Search Console, because it shows what Google actually did with your site: which pages it indexed, which it skipped and why, which URLs it chose as canonical, and how real visitors experience speed. We then crawl the site with a desktop crawler, compare the crawl to your sitemaps to find orphan pages and sitemap URLs that redirect or return errors, and fetch key templates as Googlebot would to compare raw and rendered HTML.
Each finding comes with the affected URL pattern, the evidence, the likely impact, and a specific fix in terms of your platform: a template change, a server rule, a CMS setting. Findings are grouped by template rather than listed per page, because fixing one template can fix ten thousand URLs.
Indexing and canonicals
Page indexing report reviewed by reason; canonical tags, duplicate clusters and noindex use checked against intent.
Crawl paths
Internal link depth, orphan pages, broken links, redirect chains and parameter URLs mapped across the site.
Rendering
Raw versus rendered HTML compared for key templates; lazy-loaded content and client-side links checked.
Structured data and page experience
Schema validated per template; Core Web Vitals reviewed from field data, not only lab scores.
Crawling: robots.txt, status codes and crawl budget
Crawling problems are often self-inflicted. A robots.txt line copied from a staging site blocks a whole folder. A CDN or firewall rule challenges Googlebot. A server returns a “200 OK” for pages that do not exist, so thousands of empty URLs look like real content.
Remember what robots.txt does and does not do. It stops crawling, not indexing: a blocked URL can still appear in results if other pages link to it, just without a description. To keep a page out of the index, it must be crawlable and carry a noindex directive. Google also ignores the crawl-delay rule, so it cannot be used to slow Googlebot.
Crawl budget is mainly a concern for very large or fast-changing sites. For most business sites, the real issue is crawl waste: faceted URLs, session parameters, infinite calendar pages and internal search results that eat Googlebot’s attention. Server logs show exactly where Googlebot spends its time, and we use them on larger sites to decide what to block, consolidate or link differently.
Why are my pages crawled but not indexed?
Because Google fetched the page and decided it was not worth adding to the index, at least for now. It is a quality and duplication signal more often than a technical block, which is why submitting the URL again rarely helps for long.
The usual causes: the page is very similar to other pages on your site (common on location or product-variant pages built from one template), it has little unique content, it is weakly linked internally so it looks unimportant, or it is a near-copy of content found elsewhere. “Discovered – currently not indexed” is different: Google knows the URL but has not crawled it yet, which often points to crawl waste, a slow server or too many low-value URLs.
A technical SEO freelancer fixes this by consolidating near-duplicates, making templates produce genuinely different content from real data, strengthening internal links to pages that matter, and removing low-value URLs from sitemaps and crawl paths. Progress shows up in the page indexing report over weeks, not days.
- Group affected URLs by template to find the pattern
- Compare a few affected pages side by side for duplication
- Check internal link depth and how many pages link to them
- Remove thin or duplicate URLs from sitemaps
- Improve or merge pages before requesting indexing again
Canonicals, redirects and duplicate URLs
Duplicate URLs are the most common technical SEO problem we see on Indian business sites, especially stores and sites built on older CMS themes. The same page reachable with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, over HTTP and HTTPS, and with tracking parameters can look like five pages to a crawler.
The fix combines three tools. Permanent redirects send every variant to one preferred URL at the server level. Canonical tags tell search engines which version to treat as primary where variants must exist, such as filtered product lists. Internal links point only to the preferred version. Treat the canonical tag as a strong hint rather than a command; Google can choose a different canonical if your other signals disagree.
Redirect chains deserve attention too. Every hop wastes crawl effort and slows real visitors, and after a couple of redesigns it is common to find links that pass through three or four redirects. We flatten these so each old URL goes to its final destination in one step.
How does a technical SEO freelancer add schema markup correctly?
By generating it from the same data that builds the page, in JSON-LD, and validating it before release. Hand-pasted schema drifts out of date the moment a price, address or opening hour changes.
For most business sites the useful types are Organization or LocalBusiness, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, Service or Product, Article for blog content and Review only where it follows Google’s rules. Schema should describe what is visible on the page. Marking up content that users cannot see, or inventing ratings, risks a manual action and removes trust.
Be realistic about rich results. Google has narrowed several of them in recent years; for example, FAQ rich results now show mainly for well-known government and health sites. Structured data is still worth doing because it helps search engines and AI systems understand entities and relationships on your site, even when no special result appears. We test with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator, then monitor the enhancement reports in Search Console.
Page speed and Core Web Vitals as a technical SEO task
Core Web Vitals are part of Google’s page experience signals. They are rarely the deciding factor between two results, but slow pages lose visitors before they read anything, and very slow templates can hold back crawling on large sites.
We work from field data first: the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights show what real Chrome users experience, grouped by URL pattern. Then we trace causes in the lab. Largest Contentful Paint usually improves with properly sized images, faster server responses and fewer render-blocking resources. Interaction to Next Paint improves by trimming and deferring JavaScript, especially third-party tags. Cumulative Layout Shift improves when images and embeds have reserved space and fonts load predictably.
Because our team writes code, fixes happen in the templates themselves rather than through stacked optimisation plugins that often add their own weight.
For speed work on its own, see website speed optimisation.
JavaScript SEO: when React or Angular hides your content
Google can render JavaScript, but rendering takes extra resources and time, and other search engines and many AI crawlers do far less of it. If your key content, links or meta tags exist only after client-side JavaScript runs, you are relying on every crawler doing extra work for you.
We check this by comparing the raw HTML response with the rendered DOM, using the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and a headless browser. Common problems include links built with click handlers instead of real anchor tags, content loaded only after scrolling or clicking, titles and canonicals set late by scripts, and error pages that return a 200 status because the app handles routing in the browser.
Fixes range from small changes, such as real anchor links and server-set meta tags, to moving key templates to server-side rendering or static generation with frameworks such as Next.js or Astro. We pick the smallest change that makes important content present in the initial HTML.
How should a technical SEO freelancer handle a site migration?
With a redirect map built before launch, a staging crawl, and close monitoring for several weeks afterwards. Most traffic losses after a redesign come from URLs that changed without redirects, content that was dropped, or a staging noindex tag that went live.
Our migration checklist: crawl the old site and export every URL with traffic or links; map each one to its best new equivalent; test the redirects on staging; compare titles, headings, canonicals and structured data between old and new templates; confirm robots.txt and noindex settings; then launch, submit the new sitemap and watch Search Console coverage, crawl stats and traffic by page type daily for the first weeks.
A temporary dip is normal while Google processes the change. A deep or lasting drop usually has a findable cause, and the old URL list is what lets you find it.
Platform moves are covered in more depth on website migration freelancer and WordPress to Next.js migration.
How much does a technical SEO freelancer cost in India?
With BtechWaleTech, ongoing monthly SEO starts at ₹10,000/mo (US$150/mo for clients abroad). It covers monitoring Search Console, fixing issues as they appear, technical improvements in priority order and a monthly report. One-off audits are quoted by site size and platform after a first look, since the effort for a small brochure site and a large store differs enormously.
Across the market, technical SEO quotes vary widely. The difference usually comes from three things: whether the freelancer implements fixes or only reports them, the size and complexity of the site, and how deep the analysis goes (a tool export versus log files, rendering checks and template-level diagnosis).
The hidden cost to watch is implementation. An audit that your developer then needs weeks to interpret can cost more in total than one where the fixes are done by the same people. If you want a new site built correctly from the start, the SEO website plan starts at ₹20,000.
How to choose a technical SEO freelancer you can trust
Ask them to look at your Search Console for thirty minutes on a call and tell you what they see. A capable technical SEO freelancer will read the page indexing report, spot patterns by template and ask about your platform and recent changes. Someone who only talks about keywords and backlinks is a different kind of specialist.
Then check how they deliver. Do they give you prioritised fixes with evidence, or a tool export? Can they implement changes, or will they need your developer? Do they explain things in plain words? And do they refuse to promise rankings? Anyone guaranteeing a first-page position is either misunderstanding search or misleading you.
- Asks for Search Console access before quoting
- Explains findings by template and impact, not by warning count
- Can read your code or CMS configuration
- Uses logs and rendering checks on larger or JavaScript-heavy sites
- Keeps a change log so you can link fixes to results
- Never guarantees rankings or traffic numbers
For broader hiring advice, see hire an SEO expert.
Technical SEO for Indian sites: hosting, languages and mobile
Indian sites face a few technical patterns more often than others. Cheap shared hosting with slow server response hurts both crawling and speed. Many businesses serve Hindi or regional-language pages without proper hreflang and lang attributes, so Google shows the wrong version or treats them as duplicates. And because most visitors are on mobile, a desktop-first theme with hidden mobile content can undercut Google’s mobile-first indexing.
We check where the server sits and how quickly it responds from India, set up a CDN where it helps, and tune hosting on AWS or your existing provider. For multilingual sites we make each language version reachable at its own URL, add reciprocal hreflang tags and ensure the lang attribute matches the content.
Local businesses also need consistent name, address and phone data across the site and structured data that matches their Google Business Profile. For that side of the work, see local SEO expert and Google Business Profile expert.
Example: 3,000 location pages, 400 indexed
A hypothetical scenario to show the approach; it is not a real client.
A home-services business launched a page for every service in every locality it covers: about 3,000 URLs built from one template. Three months later Search Console shows roughly 400 indexed and most of the rest as “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Discovered – currently not indexed”.
A technical SEO freelancer would first sample pages from both groups and compare them. Likely finding: apart from the locality name, the pages are nearly identical, and none are linked from the main navigation or from each other. The fix plan would merge localities that have no distinct demand, enrich remaining pages with real data (service availability, response times, local examples written for that area), add hub pages that link to them logically, drop low-value URLs from the sitemap and set internal links so each important page sits within a few clicks of the home page. Progress would be tracked monthly in the page indexing report, with no promise of a particular number.
Freelance technical SEO services across India
Technical SEO is fully remote work: Search Console, analytics, repositories and hosting dashboards are online, and discussions happen on video calls and WhatsApp. Our process and starting prices are the same in every city.
City pages give local context for businesses in Mumbai, Delhi, Thane, Faridabad, Varanasi, Gwalior, Jalandhar, Salem, Tiruchirappalli and Guntur.
Sites aimed at the USA, UK, UAE or other markets get the same technical work, billed in USD through Wise, bank wire or PayPal; see countries we work with.