Technical SEO for small UK businesses

Technical SEO and search-focused web development for small businesses, run by Nicolaie Cristea, a freelance developer in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, working independently since November 2017. The work covers site structure, crawlability, page speed, on-page content and the pages a site is missing, with fixes written directly into the codebase rather than handed over as recommendations. Typical clients are trade, service and small ecommerce businesses whose site exists but does not get found.

What a technical SEO engagement actually involves

It starts with an audit, and the audit is not a checklist run through a crawler. Crawler reports are useful, but they tell you what is broken, not what matters. The first job is working out which pages are meant to earn money, which of those Google can reach and index, and what stands between the two.

From there the work usually falls into four buckets. Fixing what blocks indexing: canonical mistakes, noindex tags left over from a staging build, redirect chains, pagination that hides half the catalogue. Fixing what makes pages slow or unstable, which on most small business sites means uncompressed images and a stack of plugins doing work the server should do once. Rewriting titles, headings and on-page copy so a page is unambiguously about one thing. And building the pages that should exist and do not.

That last one is often the biggest chunk of the job, which surprises people who came in asking for "SEO".

Why the first hour is spent in Search Console, not a keyword tool

Keyword tools estimate. Search Console reports. It holds the actual queries your site was shown for, the actual position, the actual click-through rate, and it is free and specific to you. Ahrefs and SERP research have their place later, mostly for working out what competitors rank for and how hard a term is to take. But the starting data should be yours.

Search Console usually answers three questions in the first sitting. Which pages already get impressions but almost no clicks, meaning the title and snippet are losing a fight the page has already half won. Which queries the site ranks at position 8 to 20 for, which is the cheapest ground to gain. And which pages Google has indexed that nobody should ever see, like tag archives, filtered URLs and old test pages diluting the crawl.

If a site has no Search Console property, or the property was never verified properly, that is the first thing set up. After a big algorithm update the same account is where the diagnosis happens, and I wrote up the exact sequence in a Search Console review checklist for after a Google core update.

Many small sites do not need optimising, they need pages that do not exist

This is the single most common finding. A plumber's site has a homepage, an about page and a contact form. Every service the business actually sells lives as a bullet point on the homepage. There is nothing to optimise, because there is no page for Google to rank.

Optimisation assumes a page exists and is underperforming. If a business does five things and has one page, the fix is not better meta descriptions. It is five pages, each one written properly, each one earning its own place in the index.

The Mirage Bodyshop rebuild is the clearest example I have. The site was rebuilt on a custom PHP CMS I wrote, with pages built for the work the business actually does. Its first three months went from near zero to 612 clicks and 56,700 impressions, and the three months to early October 2026 reached 1,670 clicks and 204,000 impressions at an average Google position of 12. Asked which bodyshop it recommends in Coventry, Google's AI Mode lists the business first. That project is covered properly on the Coventry SEO page, including the competitive picture around it.

Fixes get implemented in code, not written up in a PDF

Plenty of SEO consultants deliver a document. The document says to reduce server response time, consolidate duplicate content and improve internal linking. Then it lands on a developer who has other priorities, and six months later nothing has changed except the invoice.

I build the sites, so I fix them. The stack is PHP, MySQL, custom MVC, plus HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery and Bootstrap. Alongside client sites I have built a booking and quote CMS for Express Removals, an internal logistics CMS handling dispatch, job tracking and custom invoicing, a support portal with ticket routing, and an MVC ecommerce platform with inventory management. The CMS behind several of those builds has on-page SEO scoring and auditing built into the application itself, so content gets checked as it is written rather than months later.

Server-side work is part of the same job: hosting, domains, DNS, SMTP and email deliverability, cPanel and Plesk, general LAMP administration. That matters more than it sounds. A site that intermittently times out will not rank, and email that lands in spam is a lead problem dressed as a technical one. If your domain email is unreliable, the DNS records behind SPF, DKIM and DMARC are usually where the trouble sits.

How results get measured

Three numbers, tracked from a baseline taken before anything changes: impressions, clicks and average position, split by page and by query. Impressions moving first is normal, clicks follow, and a rising position on commercial queries beats a rising position on anything else.

Reporting is plain. What changed, what moved, what did not, and what is next. Rankings for vanity terms nobody searches do not go in the report. Neither does a traffic graph with no explanation attached to it, because a spike from an unrelated blog post is not a business result.

The AI search question comes up in nearly every conversation now. My honest position is that most of the advice circulating is invented, and the things that genuinely help are the same things that have always helped: clear structure, direct answers, real specifics. I set out what is worth doing and what is noise in a piece on preparing content for AI search without chasing myths.

What I do not do, and who should hire someone else

I do not sell link building. I will not buy links, run a private blog network, or place paid guest posts. Links earned by having something worth linking to are fine and I will help you build the asset. Buying them is a risk I am not putting on someone else's business.

I do not do paid ads. No Google Ads management, no Meta campaigns, no paid social. It is a separate discipline and there are people who do it far better than I would.

I do not take on very large ecommerce migrations with tens of thousands of SKUs across multiple markets and languages. That work needs a team and dedicated project management, not one freelancer.

I am not the right choice if you want a monthly retainer with a fixed number of blog posts attached. Content produced to fill a quota is how sites end up with forty thin pages and no rankings. I would rather write four pages that matter.

Nor am I right if you need results next week. Search rewards patience, and anyone promising otherwise is either buying traffic or lying about the timescale.

If you want an agency with a large account team, out-of-hours support and a dedicated project manager, hire an agency. That is a genuine service and worth paying for. The Birmingham SEO page goes into that comparison in more detail.

Frequently asked questions

How long before I see results?

Technical fixes can register within days: indexing errors resolved, pages that were invisible starting to appear. Content and ranking movement is slower. Expect early signals in Search Console at four to eight weeks and a meaningful picture at three to six months. On the Mirage rebuild, three months was the window in which the numbers became real. Anyone quoting you a faster timeline for organic search is guessing.

Do I need SEO or do I need a new website?

The audit answers this and it is an honest answer either way. If the site is structurally sound, indexes cleanly and loads at a reasonable speed, optimisation is cheaper and faster than a rebuild, so that is what I will recommend. If the platform fights every change, has no proper URL control, or the templates make it impossible to add pages without breaking the layout, then optimisation is money spent on a foundation that will not hold. I would rather tell you that at the audit stage than three months into a doomed engagement.

What does reporting actually look like?

A short written update with Search Console data behind it. Impressions, clicks and average position against the baseline, page by page for the pages that matter, plus what was done in the period and what is queued next. No forty-page automated dashboard export. If a number went the wrong way, it is in the report with an explanation rather than quietly left out.

What happens if it does not work?

First, we established a baseline before starting, so "not working" is a measurable claim rather than a feeling. Then we look at why. Sometimes the target queries were too competitive and the sensible move is to go after longer, more specific terms with real buying intent. Sometimes an update reshuffled the results and the recovery path is different from the growth path. Sometimes the site needs pages nobody wanted to commit to writing. What I will not do is keep invoicing for the same activity while pretending the graph is about to turn. If the honest answer is that organic search is a poor channel for your business, you will hear it.

Do you work with WordPress and other platforms?

I audit anything. Implementation is strongest on custom PHP and MVC builds, since that is what I write day to day. On third-party platforms I will fix what the platform allows and be clear about what it does not, which is usually the point where the rebuild conversation starts.

Can you handle the hosting and email too?

Yes. Hosting, domain transfers, DNS, SMTP and mail deliverability, cPanel and Plesk, LAMP server administration. Having one person responsible for the server, the site and the search performance removes the round of finger-pointing that happens when three suppliers each say it is someone else's problem.

Do you only work with businesses near Nuneaton?

No, the work is done remotely and the client's location makes little difference to a technical engagement. Local search is a different matter, because businesses serving a specific area need a different approach from national ones, and that is covered on the Nuneaton SEO page.

How is the work priced?

The common jobs have standard prices: a technical SEO audit is £295 one-off for sites up to about 100 pages, monthly SEO advice is £150 a month, website care starts at £45 a month, and a local SEO and Google Business Profile setup is £245. They are all on my work with me page. Anything larger, such as a 400-product catalogue with broken faceted navigation, is quoted after the audit, because it is not the same job. Every job gets a written quote first, and the quote is what you pay.

Next step

Send me the site address and a sentence about what you want it to do. I will look at it properly and tell you what I would fix first, whether that turns into paid work or not. Send me a message below and I will come back with something specific rather than a template.