They told me "Technical SEO is missing" — what exactly are they gonna fix, is it worth paying extra for?

Developers usually just care that the code works and the UI looks right; they don't lose sleep over how Googlebot processes that code. Your developer can ship dynamic filtered pages and call it a day, but those filters can end up generating hundreds of thousands of useless URLs for bots, draining your crawl budget. That's precisely where the distinction lies.

Take those automated scorecards in the audits with a grain of salt. Most agencies just hand clients an exported PDF straight out of automated crawling software and paint an apocalyptic picture. Half of the things they label critical don't affect your site's organic performance at all. Go into Search Console yourself, look under the 'Indexing' tab, and check how many of your pages are actually excluded.

We went through a similar technical overhaul on our site with 1,500 products. Simply cleaning up broken redirects and blocking parameterized pages dropped our indexed valid URL count from 4,200 down to 1,100, but our organic sessions doubled 4 months later. Clutter really does exhaust search engine crawlers.

Split the scope in the proposal into two: 1) Server and redirect cleanups that your dev should already be taking care of, 2) The robots strategy and canonical logic that the agency needs to architect. Try to get your current developer to handle the first group under your existing contract without paying anything extra.

same thing happened to us... dev said everything was fine but when we checked search console half the products weren't even indexed... sadly paying for blog posts without solid tech foundations is just throwing money away.

The scope of work covered by the one-off technical SEO fee should be tied to clear specifications. Exactly which pages will be made crawlable, to what level index coverage errors will be reduced, and the delivery timeline of the project must be explicitly detailed in writing within the proposal.

i keep getting warnings about page speed on my site as well. tbh when I brought it up with my developer he said the ready-made theme is bloated. is fixing that a technical SEO job or should I just switch to a new theme?

you can think of technical SEO like car engine maintenance. even if the bodywork looks spotless if the transmission is shot the car isn't going anywhere. definitely negotiate the pricing with the agency but don't just write off the entire process as unnecessary either.

Correction: I misremembered the figure, it was a bit lower.

Timely topic.

I have a question. The real issue isn't the number but what it's based on.

absolutely. if I were to add anything: Ranking is the result, search intent is the input. look at intent first.

people defend habits, not processes. resistance coems from there. good luck with that.

Could you elaborate on that? Any comment made without a control group is just a guess.

If I were you I'd go this route.

To get into the details: If rankings stay the same but clicks drop the issue isn't your page, but the search result appearance.

I'm also curious if anyone does it differently.

You're right.

saved.

I didn't know that.

We got stuck at the same point for a while. Merge instead of deleting; deleted content doesnt come back.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

The discussion got scattered let me summarize. btw if you get three different answers on a topic, the question was asked wrong.