The technical foundation that lets search and AI engines read the site at all.
Black Salt Room scores Lighthouse 100 on Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO, mobile and desktop, first run. Largest Contentful Paint 1.5 seconds mobile, Cumulative Layout Shift at zero. That is the technical baseline the studio ships for every new build. Available as a standalone audit, a focused engagement on a site the studio did not design, or the technical layer underneath a new build.
The site is doing the SEO work, and the engines cannot read it.
Technical SEO is what decides whether the rest of the SEO work even gets measured. A page that does not pass Core Web Vitals is one that does not rank no matter how good the content is. A site that renders content in JavaScript Google cannot execute is invisible to half the buyer market.
Core Web Vitals failing on the highest-traffic pages.
Largest Contentful Paint over 2.5 seconds on mobile. Cumulative Layout Shift over 0.1. Interaction to Next Paint over 200ms. The ranking penalty is direct.
JavaScript-rendered content the engines do not see.
Single-page apps that ship content client-side. AI engines and Google's secondary crawler often do not execute the JS. The content exists but is invisible.
Schema missing or broken on commercial-intent pages.
Service or ProfessionalService, Organization, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, and appropriate local business schema. The schemas Google and AI engines read to understand what the page is about. Often missing entirely.
Internal linking that does not match the IA.
Pages with no internal links pointing at them. Pages with internal links from the wrong context. The site's topical authority is undercut by its own architecture.
Indexability problems the team did not know existed.
Pages noindex'd by accident. Canonical tags pointing at the wrong URL. Robots.txt blocking the staging build. Sitemap missing half the site.
Technical debt at the SEO layer compounds.
The cost of technical SEO problems is not the ranking the site does not get. It is the work the team puts into content, design, and link building that never compounds because the foundation is breaking it.
Content investment that does not compound.
The team writes journal articles, lands guest posts, runs campaigns. If the technical layer is broken, the work does not lift the site.
A Core Web Vitals penalty applied across every page.
Not a per-page penalty. A site-wide drag. Every page on the site ranks worse than it should because the technical foundation is slow.
AI engines that cannot extract content.
Server-side rendering or static generation matters more now than it did before AI search. Client-rendered content is increasingly invisible.
A migration ahead that the team is afraid to do.
The longer the technical debt sits, the more risky the eventual rebuild gets.
Six moves that fix the technical foundation.
Technical SEO is structural. The studio audits, prioritizes by ranking impact, and ships fixes in order of leverage. Not every problem deserves the same urgency; the audit picks what matters.
Crawl and audit.
Full site crawl. Core Web Vitals on every template. Schema audit. Indexability audit. Sitemap, robots, canonicals. Documented gap analysis.
Core Web Vitals fixes prioritized by traffic.
The highest-traffic pages get fixed first. LCP, CLS, INP improvements measured against real-user data from CrUX, not just lab tests.
Schema standardization.
Service or ProfessionalService, Organization, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, and appropriate local business schema emitted consistently across templates. Validated before deploy.
JavaScript rendering decisions.
Server-side rendering, static generation, or hybrid. The decision depends on what the engines need to extract and how often the content changes.
Internal linking architecture.
Hub-and-spoke per service line. Sub-service pages link up. Journal articles link up. The IA is enforced through the link graph, not just the nav.
Indexability and crawl-budget cleanup.
Canonical tags audited. Noindex audit. Robots.txt audit. Sitemap audit. Crawl errors in Search Console resolved.
Where is the technical foundation breaking the rest of the SEO work?
Send the URL and the current Lighthouse score. Alex replies with the rough audit shape within a business day.
Outcomes every technical-SEO engagement ships with.
Specific deliverables that hold across Next.js, WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, and custom stacks.
Core Web Vitals passing on the highest-traffic pages.
LCP under 2.5s, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200ms. Validated against real-user data, not just lab tests.
Schema validated and consistent.
Service or ProfessionalService, Organization, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, and appropriate local business schema emitted consistently across templates. No broken schema at launch.
Indexability and crawl-budget cleaned up.
Canonicals, noindex, robots, sitemap audited. Search Console crawl errors resolved.
How the work moves.
Phase 1: Audit
Full crawl, Core Web Vitals on every template, schema audit, indexability audit, internal linking audit, Search Console baseline.
Phase 2: Prioritization
Gap analysis ranked by ranking impact and traffic. The fixes most likely to move ranking ship first.
Phase 3: Fixes
Core Web Vitals work, schema standardization, JavaScript rendering decisions, internal linking architecture. Shipped in order of priority.
Phase 4: Validation
Schema validation on every schema'd page. CrUX data confirms CWV improvements. Search Console resubmission.
Phase 5: Monitoring
30-day Search Console watch. CWV monitoring. Adjustments before sign-off.
Things worth knowing.
Does the studio do technical SEO on any platform, or only on Next.js?
What is the difference between technical SEO and SEO migration?
Will Core Web Vitals improvements show up immediately?
What schema does the studio standardize on?
Does the studio handle indexability cleanup as part of technical SEO?
How much does a technical-SEO engagement cost?
Related work across the studio.
A site the engines can actually read.
Send the URL and the Lighthouse report. The first call settles the audit scope and the prioritized fixes.