Technical SEO FAQs

/in /by

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of a website’s technical elements to improve its visibility and rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). Unlike on-page or off-page SEO, which focuses on content and external factors like backlinks, technical SEO deals with the backend aspects of a website that affect its performance in search engines. This includes factors such as website speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, site architecture, URL structure, indexing, and security protocols like HTTPS.

Technical SEO ensures that search engine crawlers can efficiently crawl and index website content, making it easier for search engines to understand and rank the site’s pages. By addressing technical issues and optimizing these elements, websites can enhance their overall search engine visibility, user experience, and ultimately drive more organic traffic to their site.

At Nexus Marketing, we help clients develop a strong technical SEO foundation to support the success of our on-page and off-site SEO strategies.

General Questions

What does the “site health” score mean?

Site health is a metric calculated by Semrush on a scale of 0-100% that provides a single number to understand the technical SEO Health of the site. 

The fewer errors and warnings found during a crawl (in comparison with the size of your site), the higher and healthier your Site Health score.


For more information about site health, check out this explainer from Semrush.

What parts of the website are you crawling?

For websites that have multiple subdomains, we’ll limit the scope of the crawl to your marketing site where our SEO work is focused.

If you have a resource/blog subdomain, we’ll include that in the crawl, but we’ll exclude parts of your site that are customer-generated or intended for existing customers, like help/support subdomains.

Ongoing Technical SEO As Part of Your Engagement

What technical SEO activities are included as part of my standard Nexus engagement?

On a quarterly basis, part of the account strategy time in your engagement goes towards technical SEO audits and improvements.

Think of this as a routine checkup at a doctor’s office. 

In a standard Nexus client engagement, 20-25% of monthly engagement hours are typically dedicated to account strategy, project management, reporting, and technical SEO. 

The subset of technical SEO hours is usually ample time for the routine maintenance needed to keep the technical foundation of the site healthy if we’re working from a strong foundation. 

Your CMS can also impact how easy it is to maintain the technical SEO of the website. Solving issues is more efficient in standard CMS tools like WordPress and Hubspot, but it may be more time-consuming or complex if your site operates on a custom or less-common CMS. Your account manager will let you know if your CMS requires more time.

In some cases, we’ll elevate the need to spend additional dedicated time to improve the technical SEO health of the site. This may occur when:

  • Unexpected new issues have arisen
  • and/or there are more critical issues than we’re able to solve for in this time frame, we’ll elevate the need to spend additional dedicated time to improve the technical SEO health of the site.


When will you resolve technical SEO issues as part of my standard Nexus engagement?

On a rolling cadence of every 3 months, your account manager will provide an update on our latest round of technical SEO fixes either via email or in your monthly check-in. In most cases, no action will be required on your end, and this update is just for reference.

If you have questions about when to expect your next scheduled maintenance, please reach out to your account manager.

Additional Technical SEO Projects

When would Nexus propose an additional SEO project beyond a standard engagement?

In keeping with the analogy that our standard technical SEO maintenance is a routine doctor’s checkup, sometimes we may uncover an issue that requires more significant follow-up treatment.

This could be flagged in two main ways:

  1. Site health. A failing grade of 70% or below on the site health score indicates significant opportunities for technical SEO optimization to improve the performance of your site.
  2. Number of high-priority errors. If there are more high-priority errors (like broken links or redirect chains, than we’re able to solve for within our standard engagement, we’ll propose spending more time to solve these issues.

If your website has a low site health score or a significant number of errors, we’ll prescribe a treatment plan to get your website back into peak condition.

How do you create an estimated scope for technical SEO issues?

Websites and technical SEO issues are unique so calculating the time needed is an estimation rather than an exact science.

We use a multiplier of 4 minutes per issue under the assumption that the majority of fixes will take around 3-5 minutes to find in the CMS and resolve. 

In some cases, some issues may be able to be solved in bulk with a change in setting or a single fix, but others will take longer than the scoped time. 

We’ll focus our attention on the highest-priority issues that should be most straightforward to fix with the biggest possible positive impact on your overall SEO performance.

What types of technical SEO issues is the Nexus team able to solve?

  • Link issues: Including 4xx errors, broken external links, and HTTP links
  • Redirect issues: Including redirect chains, redirect loops, redirect to 4xx
  • Sitemap issues: Fixing issues with incorrect pages being included in sitemap
  • Site speed / core web vitals issues: Depending on your content management system we have experience troubleshooting and testing page speed improvements using built-in settings or plugins. We often use the
    caching plugin WP Rocket to improve performance for clients on WordPress sites.
  • Metadata and content issues: Including duplicate content, meta description issues, meta title issues, H1 issues, and more.

What happens if the issues are highly complex and need a web developer?

While we have the internal expertise to resolve most standard issues, in some cases we may need to elevate issues to your web developer or site admin. 

This may happen in the following scenarios:

  • Non-standard content management system causing unexpected issues
  • Problems caused by theme settings or plugin settings
  • Any other issues that can’t be solved on a page level and could risk breaking the site without knowledge of your site’s theme and structure

What does the process look like for Nexus to deliver on a technical SEO project?

  • Kickoff: Once our project agreement is signed, we’ll immediately jump in to start resolving
  • Ongoing Project Updates: Depending on the timeline of the project, you can expect weekly updates from your account manager with details about progress towards resolving different types of issues.
  • Project Completion: Once the project is completed, we’ll provide a summary of the issues resolved and an update on your site health score.
  • Go-Forward Performance Monitoring. While technical SEO improvements don’t always have a sudden and dramatic impact, over the coming months we’ll continue to monitor the performance of the website to track the success of the project.

How long will it take to complete a one-time technical SEO project?

When we share our proposal for a technical SEO project, we’ll also share an estimated timeline for when you can expect the project to be completed. 

This is typically 30 days or less, but may vary based on factors including:

  • The complexity of your content management system
  • The estimated time needed to resolve issues – As you may expect, 10 hour projects can be turned around more quickly than 50 hour projects
  • Team capacity depending on other ongoing projects

In any of these cases, we’d still give you a timeline of when you can expect the project to be completed, as well as provide updates along the way.