Most SEO strategies fail not because of bad content, but because of hidden technical barriers that prevent Google from properly crawling, rendering, and ranking your site. I find and fix the problems other consultants miss.
Google’s mobile-first index means your mobile performance score is your primary ranking signal. A one-second delay reduces conversions by up to 7%. I audit, diagnose, and brief your development team with precise, production-ready fixes, not just a Lighthouse PDF.
Page speed is one of the most misunderstood areas of SEO. At Vuly Play, the homepage carried a 3/100 mobile PageSpeed score and a total network payload of 74MB, driven by three autoplay MP4 video loops each exceeding 10MB. The site had strong content, a solid backlink profile, and good on-page SEO, but performance was silently capping its ranking potential.
In a competitive analysis of the Australian home insurance market, QBE. The only insurer passing Core Web Vitals on mobile, ranked #1 with a mobile score of 75. Budget Direct sat at 52 and ranked #5. The pattern is consistent across every vertical I audit: mobile page speed and Core Web Vitals compliance directly correlate with top-3 rankings.
I don’t just hand you a report. I provide your developers with prioritised, actionable briefs - specific code-level recommendations, script audit results, before/after benchmarks, and a re-test protocol so implementation is efficient and measurable.
✗ JS execution time > 4s (main thread blocked) ✗ Unused JavaScript: 462 KiB savings available ✗ Unused CSS: 22 KiB of render-blocking styles ✗ Network payload: 74 MB (target: < 4 MB mobile) ✗ 3x autoplay MP4 loops > 10 MB each ✗ No Brotli/gzip compression on static assets ✗ Third-party scripts loading synchronously ✗ No code splitting on main-bundle.js (~1 MB) ✗ Images: no AVIF/WebP, no lazy loading ✗ No CDN edge caching configured ✗ LCP hero image not preloaded
Code splitting, tree shaking, and deferred loading of non-critical scripts, GTM, ZenDesk, Facebook Pixel, TikTok. Reduce JS execution time from 4+ seconds to under 2. Async/defer implementation briefs tailored for your dev team.
Convert hero assets to AVIF/WebP, implement responsive srcset/sizes, apply lazy loading below the fold, and replace autoplay video loops with lightweight poster-image alternatives. Major payload reductions with no UX compromise.
Edge caching, Brotli compression, HTTP/2, long-lived cache headers for versioned assets, preconnect for critical third-party origins, and TTFB reduction strategies so content reaches users as fast as physically possible.
Inline critical above-the-fold CSS (~10–14KB), defer non-critical stylesheets, eliminate render-blocking resources, implement font-display: swap. Directly improves First Contentful Paint and LCP scores.
Google’s mobile-first index makes mobile your primary ranking signal. I test on real device profiles, identify mobile-specific issues, oversized heroes, stacked content, layout shifts, and deliver responsive-specific fix briefs.
Before-and-after PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and WebPageTest benchmarks. Automated Lighthouse CI recommendations, Real User Monitoring via GA4 + Web Vitals API, and performance budgets to prevent post-launch regressions.
Core Web Vitals became an official Google ranking signal in May 2021. Across every competitive audit I’ve conducted, insurance, eCommerce, SaaS, sites passing Core Web Vitals on mobile consistently outrank those that don’t. Passing is not a nice-to-have. It’s table stakes.
| Metric | What It Measures | Good | Needs Work | Poor | Primary Fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LCP, Largest Contentful Paint | How fast your main content loads | ≤ 2.5s | 2.5–4.0s | > 4.0s | Hero image preload, AVIF/WebP, CDN |
| INP, Interaction to Next Paint | Responsiveness to user interactions | ≤ 200ms | 200–500ms | > 500ms | Reduce JS execution, break long tasks |
| CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift | Visual stability during page load | ≤ 0.1 | 0.1–0.25 | > 0.25 | Set width/height on all media elements |
In the home insurance audit I conducted for a major Australian insurer, QBE was the only competitor passing Core Web Vitals on mobile, and the only one ranking in the top 2. Budget Direct failed on CLS. Allianz, Suncorp, AAMI, and CommBank all failed on LCP. The pattern was unambiguous.
For Vuly Play, GSC reported desktop had 159 poor URLs and 54 needing improvement, while mobile appeared “valid” in field data, yet a 3/100 lab score told the real story. This discrepancy between field data and lab data is something I identify and explain clearly, because the fix strategies differ depending on which is true.
I don’t just flag failures. I diagnose the root cause, whether it’s a Lottie animation, an unstated image dimension causing layout shift, a render-blocking GTM tag, or a client-side rendered framework failing bot rendering, and deliver targeted developer briefs for each issue.
Schema markup is the bridge between your content and how search engines and AI systems interpret it. Well-implemented structured data unlocks rich results, improves click-through rates, and is essential for AI Overview inclusion. It’s also one of the most consistently botched technical SEO elements I encounter in audits.
In the home insurance competitive analysis, Budget Direct had Product and FAQPage schema but was missing BreadcrumbList and had no Brand or description data in the Product schema. Allianz had BreadcrumbList but no Product schema. QBE. The top-ranking site, had both Product and FAQPage correctly implemented.
For Freelancer\.com, the primary gap was the complete absence of SoftwareApplication, Service, and Organization schema - critical for a B2B SaaS competing in RegTech. Without these, Google and generative AI systems cannot correctly categorise the product or surface it for relevant non-branded queries.
I implement schema as JSON-LD (Google’s preferred format), validated against schema.org and the Rich Results Test, and built to be CMS-automated wherever possible so every new page inherits the correct schema automatically without manual work.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "BreadcrumbList",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 1,
"name": "Home",
"item": "https://example.com/"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 2,
"name": "KYC / KYB Solutions",
"item": "https://example.com/kyc-kyb-aml/"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 3,
"name": "AML Compliance"
}
]
}
</script>Product, AggregateRating, Offer, and Brand schema for eCommerce. SoftwareApplication and Service schema for SaaS and B2B platforms. Maximises rich result eligibility and AI visibility for your key pages.
Organization markup with logo, contact details, founding date, social profiles, and sameAs links. The foundation for brand entity establishment in Google’s Knowledge Graph, critical for AI systems that need to understand who you are before they’ll cite you.
FAQPage schema to win FAQ rich results and populate AI Overview answers directly. HowTo schema for instructional content. Both are critical for AEO, getting your content cited in Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and ChatGPT Search responses.
Visual and JSON-LD breadcrumbs implemented together, UX navigation for users, site hierarchy for Google, and breadcrumb trails in SERPs. Automated via CMS so every new page inherits the correct schema. Already implemented across Webflow, WordPress, and custom CMSs.
Article and BlogPosting schema with linked Person author markup, critical for E-E-A-T on YMYL sites. Includes author credentials, professional profiles, and sameAs links. Fact-checker and publisher schema for regulatory, health, and financial content.
VideoObject schema with transcript, thumbnail, upload date, and duration, enabling video rich results and AI discoverability. Review and AggregateRating schema to surface star ratings in SERPs and improve CTR on product and service pages.
Crawlability issues are silent ranking killers. Strong content and good backlinks count for nothing if Google can’t efficiently discover, crawl, render, and index your pages. I use Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and log file analysis to uncover every crawl-budget waste and indexation barrier.
International SEO is one of the most technically complex areas of search, and one of the most frequently implemented incorrectly. I’ve managed international SEO across 50+ websites at Freelancer.com and across 8 market-specific sites at Vuly Play. The issues I find are consistent: broken hreflang, duplicated content, country-misattributed pages, and inconsistent canonicalisation.
At Vuly Play, a GSC audit revealed 720 pages “Crawled, not indexed” across their international portfolio. Investigation found blog posts duplicated across country sites without hreflang, accessories pages with only 3–4 hreflang tags instead of the full set of 8, and locale-specific sitemaps referencing other countries’ content.
Specific issues included the fr-CA sitemap referencing Australia and Canada interchangeably, the fr-FR sitemap referencing both Australia and Canada in page names, a UK installation page carrying “Vuly Australia” in its title tag, and hreflang tags on fr-CA incorrectly referencing en-DE instead of de-DE. These aren’t edge cases, they’re typical of sites that have grown internationally without a structured hreflang strategy.
I build international SEO frameworks from scratch - correct subdirectory structure, full hreflang implementation validated across every locale, unique localised metadata, and a GSC property setup giving you independent performance visibility per market.
<!-- Required in <head> on EVERY page in EVERY locale --> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="https://example.com/en-AU/trampolines/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-NZ" href="https://example.com/en-NZ/trampolines/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://example.com/en-US/trampolines/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-CA" href="https://example.com/en-CA/trampolines/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://example.com/en-GB/trampolines/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-DE" href="https://example.com/de-DE/trampolins/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://example.com/fr-FR/trampolines/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://example.com/fr-CA/trampolines/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/en-AU/trampolines/" />
E-E-A-T, Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, is Google’s quality framework, particularly important for YMYL content in finance, health, insurance, and legal sectors. Technical SEO plays a significant role: structured data, author attribution, freshness signals, and trust infrastructure all contribute measurably.
Dedicated author profile pages with credentials, experience, and professional links. Articles associated with verified authors via Article schema and Person markup. sameAs linking to LinkedIn, industry publications, and professional registrations. Critical for health, finance, and insurance content.
“Last Updated” timestamps on key pages, structured dateModified markup in Article schema, and changelog implementation for product and policy pages. Freshness signals matter particularly for insurance, compliance, software documentation, and regulatory content.
Privacy policy, terms of service, and contact pages correctly indexed (not blocked by robots.txt, a surprisingly common issue I find). SSL correctly configured. Organization schema with verified contact details. Team credentials and regulatory compliance surfaced in both HTML and structured data.
Identify thin content, pages lacking depth, articles without author attribution, and posts without evidence or citations. I produce a prioritised content improvement brief, not just a flag list, but actionable rewrite guidance with word count targets, E-E-A-T requirements, and schema specs per page type.
Identify opportunities to earn mentions and citations from authoritative industry sources, regulatory bodies, industry associations, independent review platforms, and trade publications. External signals are a core component of how Google evaluates authority beyond your own domain.
Structure key pages with expert-backed FAQs that answer real user queries directly. Fact-check attribution for sensitive topics. “How to” content with clear steps, schema markup, and expert reviewer attribution. Simultaneously strengthens E-E-A-T and increases AI Overview inclusion likelihood.
Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, Perplexity, and ChatGPT Search are reshaping how users discover content. Sites that are already technically strong, clear entity definitions, robust schema, factual accuracy, well-structured content, and server-side rendering, have a significant head start. I build GEO and AEO strategies that compound on your existing SEO investment.
Free 30-minute consultation. I’ll identify your biggest technical opportunities and tell you exactly where to focus first.