Services

Technical SEO

Technical SEO services

This page explains what Hitfire Digital’s technical SEO service covers, who it suits, the results it has produced and how we measure them. The work is led by Sadie de Pinto, who has more than 20 years in technical SEO and analytics. Last updated 6 October 2026.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the work of making sure search engines and AI crawlers can find, render and index every page that matters on a website. It covers crawlability, indexation, site speed, internal linking, redirects, canonical tags and structured data. Content and links only pay off once this layer is sound: a page that is blocked in robots.txt, carries a stray noindex or only appears after JavaScript runs cannot rank, and it cannot be cited in AI answers either. Google’s AI Overviews retrieve from Google’s own index, and AI search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot do not run JavaScript, so technical problems now cost visibility in two channels at once. At Hitfire Digital, technical SEO is the first phase of every engagement, because fixing the foundation first stops later content and link work from amplifying problems.

What does the technical SEO service include?

Every engagement starts with a full crawl and ends with a prioritised fix list, ranked by impact and effort.

• Technical crawl, plus server log review where logs are available
• Indexation, canonical, redirect and status code audit
• Core Web Vitals and template speed fixes (LCP, INP and CLS)
• JavaScript rendering checks, so key content is in the server-rendered HTML
• Site architecture, internal linking and click depth
• Robots.txt, CDN and firewall checks, so AI search crawlers are not blocked by accident
• WordPress migrations with redirect mapping and post-launch checks

Who is technical SEO for?

Technical SEO is worth prioritising when a site has stopped growing despite steady publishing, when traffic fell after a Google core update, when a migration or redesign is planned, or when important pages are missing from Google’s index. It also suits large WordPress sites, where crawl budget and duplicate URLs quietly waste Googlebot’s attention. If retailers, directories or distributors outrank you for your own brand name, your site is usually sending unclear signals, and technical issues are often part of the cause. A quick test is to compare the number of pages you expect to rank with the number Google reports as indexed in Search Console. A large gap in either direction usually points to crawl or duplication problems. Hitfire Digital works with in-house marketing teams, founders and agencies, and hands every finding over with the evidence behind it.

What results has this technical SEO work produced?

A premium craft gin brand that sells through its own website was being outranked for its own name by its distributors and retailers. Hitfire Digital ran a full technical audit first, and the brand’s team implemented the prioritised fixes. Content and metadata improvements came next, and a focused round of link building came last. Within the six-month project, the brand moved to number one for its own brand name. Because it sells directly through its site, conversions and revenue increased by around 300%. The lesson: when third parties outrank a brand for its own name, the site is usually sending unclear signals to search engines, and links built on an unhealthy site amplify the problem instead of the brand. Links were part of the fix, but they came last, after the foundation was sound.

Four more client sites came through the March 2025 Google core update with conversions up between 17.97% and 692.76%, measured in GA4. One of them, a luxury wallpaper brand, deliberately gave up some visibility to focus on keywords that convert, and still grew conversions by 55.21%. The case studies show the full numbers, including organic traffic and visibility for each site.

How do you measure technical SEO results?

Every Hitfire Digital technical SEO engagement starts with a dated baseline: indexed and non-indexed pages from Search Console’s Page Indexing report, Core Web Vitals field data for key templates, and clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for 10 to 20 priority queries. We re-check the same measures 28 and 90 days after each fix ships, so you can see what moved and what did not. The numbers that matter most are organic sessions and conversions on the pages that make money, measured in GA4, because a cleaner crawl report only has value when it turns into qualified leads. Each result is reported against the baseline in plain language, with the change that caused it, so you know which fixes earned their place and which ones still need more time to show their effect.

Who does the work?

Hitfire Digital is run by Sadie de Pinto, an SEO lead and AI automation specialist based in Cape Town, with more than 20 years in technical SEO, web analytics, conversion rate optimisation and IT project management. She is the author of Search Mastery: The SEO, GEO & AEO Playbook (2026), the method this service follows, and holds a BCom in Information Systems from the University of Cape Town and an Executive MBA from Quantic. You work with her directly. Read more about Sadie.

Technical SEO questions

Which related services work alongside this one?

Technical SEO is often paired with GEO / AEO and Analytics. See GEO / AEO services and Analytics services, or compare all four Hitfire Digital services.