Pages missing from Google
I check whether links from the homepage reach those pages. Often nothing links to that section, or its pages only link to each other.
Technical SEO consultant
I’m Stanislav Baciu, a technical SEO consultant, in SEO since 2016. When pages drop out of Google or traffic falls, I audit how Google crawls and indexes your site. Your developers get a prioritized fix list.
Brands I’ve worked with: WordPress VIP, Yoast, Blocksy and AlphaSpread.
What you’re seeing, and where I look first
Traffic fell after a redesign
If URLs changed, I start with the redirect map. Then I check what the new templates send Google. On one site, a new theme put a multi-megabyte inline image above each article and pushed the text past the first 2 MB of HTML, which is all Googlebot reads.
Rankings held, but clicks fell
Rank trackers count a link in an AI Overview as a ranking. So a report can say rankings held while your organic positions slipped. I look at the two separately.
JavaScript site looks fine, ranks poorly
I compare the HTML your server sends with the page the browser builds. Often the links only exist after scripts run, and AI crawlers that don’t run JavaScript never see them.
What you get
- A written report for whoever signs off
- Every affected URL, for each issue
- A fix list, one row per change, in order
- High, medium or low priority on every fix
- What to change and why, for each fix
My technical SEO audit covers crawling, indexing, rendering, internal links, real-user site speed and structured data. On large sites it covers crawl budget too.
How an audit runs
A discovery call
You tell me what changed on the site and when traffic moved. We agree the scope and fee before any work starts.
Access
I need read-only access to Google Search Console and your analytics, plus the CMS or a staging site.
The audit
I crawl the site and test each finding against the live pages. Then you get the report, the affected URLs and the fix list.
The fixes
Your team ships them, or I work alongside your developers. If you want, I review changes on staging and re-check the live site once they ship.
How I check that a finding is real
A crawler will list hundreds of warnings, and most don’t cost you traffic. I test each finding before it goes on your list, and I re-count every number before the audit ships.
robots.txt against every request the page makes
If robots.txt blocks the data a page loads, Google renders your header and menu over an empty page. I test every request against robots.txt the way Google reads it, and that one-line fix goes ahead of any rebuild.
The links your server sends, against the menu the browser builds
On one multi-market site, the HTML linked every market to the global pages until scripts rewrote the links in the browser. I map the served links on their own, because none of the major AI crawlers in Vercel’s study run JavaScript.
Whether the sites beating you run the same setup
A canonical, subdomain or rendering choice is only a problem if the sites winning your searches don’t share it. On one audit, a cross-domain canonical looked like the cause until the market leader turned out to run the same setup and win.
After a traffic drop: the order I work in
First I check that the drop is real. Tracking breaks, and analytics can mix two hostnames into one report.
Then I look at the shape and the season. A one-month cliff usually means a bug, and a year-long slope usually means the pages. I compare the same months in earlier years.
Only then do I line the dates up with Google’s list of core and spam updates.
Results
AlphaSpread: 700,000 to over 1.1 million pages in Google’s index
AlphaSpread
700,000
to over 1.1 million pages in Google’s index
AlphaSpread has more than a million URLs, and about 400,000 pages were missing from Google’s index. I ran the audit and led the work on site structure and internal links that got them indexed.
Ecommerce SaaS tool: 450 to 1,200 daily clicks
Ecommerce SaaS tool
450 to 1,200
daily clicks
Traffic fell after an algorithm update, then recovered from about 450 to about 1,200 daily clicks. The audit found no single cause: thin, outdated articles competing with each other, spammy outbound links and duplicate category pages. Work started before the audit was finished, and traffic came back around the November 2024 core update.
Earlier in my career, at Zenith UK, I took over the technical SEO for a top-tier UK retail bank mid-engagement.
Questions about hiring a technical SEO consultant
How much does a technical SEO audit cost?
It depends mostly on the number of URLs and page templates. The platform, JavaScript rendering, international versions and help with the fixes count too. We agree the fee on the discovery call, before any work starts.
How soon do the fixes show up?
As Google recrawls the affected pages. After a core update, nobody can promise a recovery date. Google’s guidance says “it could take several months for our systems to learn and confirm” that a site has improved.
Can ChatGPT or a free tool do an SEO audit?
They can list warnings, and a free crawl is a fair first look. Neither knows which warnings cost you traffic, and neither compares the HTML your server sends with the page Google renders.
Does technical SEO still count with AI search?
Yes. Google’s AI optimization guide calls optimizing for generative AI search “still SEO”. Google’s AI features reach pages through the same crawling and indexing as Search, and Search doesn’t use llms.txt files.
Traffic stalled or dropped?
Tell me what changed on the site and when the traffic moved. If the cause looks technical, I’ll tell you on the call where I’d look first, and if it doesn’t, I’ll say so.
Book a discovery call