Thinking of hiring technical SEO? Read this before you move forward

Hiring technical SEO can be a very smart decision, but it can also become a poorly framed investment when expectations start from the wrong premise: that there is a universal checklist of fixes which, once applied, will always improve rankings, speed, indexation and conversions on any website. In practice, technical SEO is not magic and it is not a closed package of tricks. It is a process of diagnosis, prioritisation and execution that depends on the website’s technology, the business model, the resources available and, above all, the real impact of each change.

At BYDAS, as an agency with experience in SEO, web development and e-commerce, we often see companies looking for a technical audit as though the audit itself were the solution. It is not. An audit only becomes valuable when it separates what is essential from what is secondary, what is feasible from what is merely theoretical, and what is worth doing from what consumes time without measurable return.

Technical SEO helps improve website performance, but it does not solve everything

Technical SEO exists to improve the conditions in which a website is crawled, interpreted, loaded and understood by search engines and by users. This includes areas such as indexation, crawlability, architecture, performance, markup, mobile experience, server health, redirect management and consistency across templates. However, not every optimisation is feasible, and not every feasible optimisation deserves immediate priority.

Many businesses assume that any website can reach laboratory-style results: near-perfect scores in tools, minimal response times, ideal structure on every page and no reliance on third-party scripts. That view ignores reality. A simple corporate website has far more room for aggressive simplification than an online store with thousands of products, ERP integrations, payment systems, internal search, layered filters, personalisation and multiple scripts for analytics, consent or support.

A few practical examples show why a recommendation may make sense in theory and still be unrealistic in context:

• Removing every third-party script: it sounds sensible on paper, but many businesses rely on consent managers, chat tools, analytics, tag managers, customer support systems, heatmaps or paid media integrations.
• Cutting the visual weight of the first screen dramatically: this may improve certain metrics, but it can conflict with brand requirements, product photography, video or premium positioning.
• Rebuilding the entire front end to gain a few extra performance points: in some cases, the technical and financial cost is simply larger than the likely benefit.
• Changing platform only because another one promises better speed: if operations, catalogue management and integrations already work well, a migration may destroy more value than it creates.
• Applying extremely aggressive caching rules: useful in many environments, but limited when pricing is dynamic, stock is updated in real time or content changes according to user context.

In other words, technical SEO is an exercise in balance. It requires enough strategic maturity to tell a client that a recommendation may be technically correct while still being commercially misaligned, operationally risky or simply unimportant at that stage of the project.

Not everything found in an audit should be implemented

A serious technical audit should support decision-making. It should not behave like an endless task list detached from the website’s reality. Still, many audits present dozens or hundreds of warnings as though they carried the same weight. That creates false urgency and reinforces the idea that the website is always technically underperforming.

The problem becomes even worse when the report is built almost entirely from automated tools. Those tools are useful, but they do not understand the business, the implementation cost or the technical dependencies. They detect patterns; they do not define commercial priorities. An automated warning may point to a real issue, a minor detail with no real impact or a recommendation that is simply impractical within that ecosystem.

Common examples include the following:

• Minifying or removing unused code: it may look straightforward, but in complex themes, older CMS environments or heavily modular websites, separating what is truly unnecessary can require a major rebuild.
• Eliminating render-blocking resources: this can involve touching critical stylesheets, core libraries or components that support menus, forms, legal banners and interactive functionality.
• Deferring all scripts: it can improve certain performance readings, but it may also break measurement, consent handling, remarketing, experimentation or key on-page features.
• Serving lighter image formats everywhere: highly desirable in principle, but not every CMS has reliable automated transformation and not every editorial workflow is prepared for it.
• Always preloading the LCP image: useful on some templates, but far less simple when the main image changes by campaign, language, device or user segment.
• Fixing server response time immediately: the recommendation may be valid, but sometimes the bottleneck sits inside infrastructure that the marketing team does not control directly.

This is exactly where tools such as PageSpeed Insights can be misunderstood. The report shows opportunities and diagnostics, but it does not validate the feasibility of a technical roadmap on its own. Some recommendations require server access, theme refactoring, architectural changes, replacing applications, changing commercial flows or negotiating with external providers. In other situations, the recommendation is valid, yet the likely gain is too small to justify the effort.

Take an e-commerce site that depends on reviews, recommendation engines, consent management, advertising pixels, advanced internal search and express checkout methods. The tool will likely flag heavy JavaScript, third-party impact and long main-thread tasks. The diagnosis may be correct. But that does not automatically mean the right answer is to strip everything out. In many projects, the right approach is to decide what to keep, what to replace and what to accept as a reasonable trade-off.

A technical recommendation is not an absolute command

One of the clearest signs of maturity in a technical SEO provider lies in the language it uses. Anyone promising to fix everything, turn every metric green and apply every automated recommendation literally is usually ignoring what matters most: impact, priority and cost versus benefit. A competent team knows how to separate different levels of action.

1. Critical issues, which block indexation, create serious duplication, waste authority or clearly damage user experience.
2. Important issues, which deserve planned intervention and can produce meaningful improvements.
3. Desirable improvements, which have incremental value but no immediate urgency.
4. Cosmetic details, which appear in a report but rarely change the business outcome.

Without that level of interpretation, a client can end up paying for technical sprints focused on details that look impressive in reports while doing very little for organic growth.

Search engines no longer operate as if this were the 1990s

Another key point before hiring technical SEO is understanding that there is a huge difference between current best practice and outdated legacy thinking from early SEO. For years, the industry encouraged the idea that search engines constantly needed help to understand the basics: over-engineered titles, excessive metadata, literal keyword repetition, rigid density targets and markup applied without judgment.

Today, search engines are far more sophisticated in the way they interpret context, semantics, document structure, relationships between pages and quality signals. That does not mean technical SEO has become irrelevant. It means there is no value in selling as essential what belongs to an outdated stage of the discipline.

Some metadata remains useful, while other metadata had its importance inflated for far too long. The classic example is meta keywords. For years, it was treated as a meaningful element. In practical SEO terms today, it is irrelevant. Presenting it as a crucial requirement is a warning sign. The same applies to the obsession with redundant declarations, markup with no clear purpose or duplicated signals that the document already communicates well on its own.

The meta description still matters as a messaging element that can influence how a result appears and how likely it is to be clicked. But it should not be framed as a magic ranking lever. The page title remains important too, although it does not require artificial formulas or excessive repetition. In many projects, the best option is to write clear, useful titles aligned with search intent rather than forcing every possible keyword variant into the same line.

The same principle applies to structured data. It can be valuable, especially when it helps clarify entities, products, articles, FAQs, events or organisational logic. But marking up everything without conceptual validation and without a clear objective turns a good practice into technical decoration. Search engines do not need crutches on pages that are already well built; they need consistency, accessibility, clarity and trustworthy signals.

The myth of the mandatory H1 and other repeated dogmas

Few topics illustrate technical SEO myths better than the discussion around the H1. Even now, some providers still present the absence of a single H1 per page as though it were a dramatic problem, almost as if the page became unreadable to a search engine. That interpretation is simplistic and, in many cases, incorrect.

Having a clear H1 that matches the page topic and supports visual hierarchy is still a good practice. It helps organise the document, reinforces the main subject and contributes to editorial consistency. But it is not correct to treat the H1 as an isolated, absolute and decisive requirement. Search engines can understand context through many other signals: the title element, the body copy, subheadings, navigation, internal links, document semantics and overall structure.

There are also technical realities in which the H1 discussion is less linear than many checklists suggest. Some systems rely on reusable components, product page logic, modular landing pages, internal result pages or dynamic layouts. In those contexts, the real question is not whether a ritual has been followed for the sake of a tool. The real question is whether the page communicates its topic clearly to both users and search engines.

That said, the opposite extreme is also unhelpful. It would be wrong to claim the H1 never matters. It does matter, but within the right frame: as part of a logical structure, not as a technical fetish. The useful question is not whether a page contains an H1 because a checklist said so. The useful question is whether the page is clear, well organised and semantically understandable.

Other myths remain just as common:

• Every page needs an exact keyword density: it does not. Writing that way usually harms quality.
• Every image must contain the main keyword in its alt attribute: false. Alt text should describe the image when that improves context and accessibility.
• Every 404 is a major issue: not necessarily. Some removed pages are perfectly natural. The problem lies in scale, pattern and impact.
• The more metadata you declare, the better: no. Usefulness depends on page type and objective.
• An XML sitemap guarantees indexation: it does not. It helps discovery, but it does not force search engines to index weak or duplicate content.
• The goal is to score 100 everywhere: that is a lab target, not a business target.
• No exact-match URL means no strong rankings: URLs can help, but they do not compensate for poor architecture or weak content.
• Canonical tags solve every duplication problem: they do not, and when poorly implemented they can create even more noise.

What you should actually assess before hiring technical SEO

Before hiring an agency or consultancy, it is worth checking whether they talk about real problems or technical superstition. A serious technical SEO proposal should show the ability to connect analysis with implementation. It should explain which issues affect indexation, which performance improvements are likely to matter, which dependencies exist, which changes require development and which actions can be taken without operational risk.

There should also be transparency around what is not worth doing yet. This is one of the clearest differences between mature consultancy and aggressive sales language. No one benefits when the technical roadmap is built to impress through volume rather than deliver meaningful outcomes. On many websites, the biggest wins come from a handful of sound decisions: consolidating templates, fixing poor rendering behaviour, improving redirect handling, removing low-value pages, reviewing unintended indexation or strengthening category architecture.

The rest can wait, be phased or even be abandoned. And that is entirely legitimate. Technical SEO should not exist in isolation from the business. What matters is not the number of tasks closed. What matters is solving the issues that actually move the project forward.

Be cautious with agencies that audit technical SEO poorly and sell too much certainty

There is another simple but revealing criterion: you should be wary of hiring a company for technical SEO audits when that company’s own website does not demonstrate decent performance. This does not mean demanding perfection or turning vendor evaluation into a score competition. It means looking for coherence between what they sell and what they practise.

If an agency sells performance, technical structure, crawl best practice and optimised user experience, its own website should show at least basic signs of that competence: acceptable loading, consistent hierarchy, stable pages, careful mobile experience, no obvious technical failures and a clean architecture. Otherwise, the promise loses credibility.

It is true that an agency website does not always reflect the full depth of its capability. There may be commercial priorities, rebrands, postponed internal work or limited time. Even so, a very disorganised house does not inspire confidence when offering to organise someone else’s. If the agency cannot apply minimum technical quality standards to its own environment, the client should question how robust the proposed methodology really is.

When assessing a potential partner, it helps to look for clear answers to questions such as these:

1. Which technical issues are truly prioritised on my website, and why?
2. Which improvements depend on development, infrastructure or third-party providers?
3. Which audit recommendations are desirable but not urgent?
4. What impact do you expect on indexation, usability or performance, and with what limitations?
5. How do you distinguish a current best practice from an outdated SEO myth?
6. Which actions would you advise against, even if automated tools suggest them?

When a company can answer clearly, without dramatising warnings and without selling universal formulas, there is a much better chance that serious work supports the proposal.

Good technical SEO is applied analysis, not checklist theatre

In the end, hiring technical SEO makes sense when you have a partner capable of seeing a website as a living system: technology, content, business, analytics, operations and user experience. The value lies less in producing endless lists and more in deciding what to fix first, what to accept as a trade-off and what to ignore without regret.

Not every recommendation is feasible. Not everything an audit flags deserves immediate development time. Not every metadata element is essential. The H1 is not sacred. A high score in a tool is not the same as organic success. And, above all, not every company that talks about technical SEO demonstrates the technical competence required to be hired.

Anyone looking for this service should move forward with a critical mindset. A good partner does not reinforce myths, does not trap the client in 1990s logic and does not treat search engines as naive machines that need endless labels to understand the basics. Instead, it evaluates context, defines priorities, measures impact and proposes an executable plan. That is what separates useful technical SEO from performative technical SEO.

At BYDAS, we help brands connect technical analysis, development and business goals, setting realistic priorities instead of piling up recommendations with no practical effect. If you are looking for specialist support to assess your project with clear criteria, explore our SEO service.