You can have a strong reputation, a tidy fleet, great workmanship and a mobile phone that still goes quiet.
That usually is not because your service is weak. It is because Google cannot properly understand, trust, and prioritise a site that has grown messy over time – hundreds of pages, location targeting bolted on, old project posts, PDFs, quote forms, a couple of redesigns, and three different people having a go at SEO.
This is where technical SEO earns its keep. Not the box-ticking kind. The kind that stops your best pages being ignored and turns your website into an acquisition asset that produces enquiries you would actually want.
Technical SEO is the plumbing. It is everything that affects whether search engines can crawl your pages efficiently, understand what each page is about, and feel confident putting it in front of a buyer.
On a simple five-page brochure site, you can get away with a lot. On a complex website – multiple services, multiple areas, case studies, blog content, recruitment pages, maybe even a customer portal – small technical mistakes scale into big commercial problems.
The trade-off is worth saying plainly: technical fixes rarely feel exciting. They do not read like marketing. But they are often the difference between “we have content, why is nothing ranking?” and “we are visible for the searches that lead to profitable jobs”.
Most established contractors did not set out to build a complex website. It just happened.
A new service gets added. Then a new area. Then someone suggests separate pages for every town. A few years later you have dozens of near-duplicate pages, three versions of the same service, and internal links that do not reflect how a customer actually chooses a contractor.
Google sees that confusion as risk. When it is not sure which page is the main one, it spreads value thinly. Rankings wobble. The pages that should be driving enquiries get outranked by competitors with a simpler, clearer structure.
Complexity is not the enemy. Uncontrolled complexity is.
Google does not crawl every page of every site equally. It allocates attention based on authority and technical health. If your site has thousands of low-value URLs, Google spends time on the wrong things.
Index bloat is the classic symptom. You think you have 300 useful pages. Google has indexed 2,000 URLs because of parameters, filters, tag pages, thin location pages, old staging domains, and duplicated versions of the same content.
The commercial impact is simple: your strongest service and location pages get crawled less often, re-evaluated more slowly, and can sit in limbo while weaker competitors move.
Fixing it usually comes down to being disciplined about what should be indexable, and what should exist only for users.
Robots.txt and noindex directives are not just “developer stuff”. They are decisions about what you want Google to consider part of your sales catalogue.
Canonical tags matter when you have similar pages, but they are not a magic wand. If your internal links, sitemaps, and site structure suggest multiple “main” pages, Google will often ignore your canonical preference.
XML sitemaps should reflect reality. If your sitemap lists URLs that redirect, 404, or are noindexed, you are effectively telling Google, “here is a list of things to waste time on”.
If you want to win better jobs, your website has to present clear choices. Google uses your architecture as a clue to what you specialise in.
A common problem in construction is having service pages, location pages, and project pages all competing for the same intent. For example, “commercial roofing Glasgow” might have:
If those pages are not clearly organised, Google has to guess. It might rank a case study when you need a service page. Or it might rotate pages in and out of the results, which feels like instability.
Good architecture is not about creating more pages. It is about creating a clear hierarchy: core services, service sub-categories, priority locations where you genuinely operate, and supporting proof content that feeds authority into the money pages.
It depends on your business model too. If you want higher-value commercial work, you may be better served by fewer, stronger pages aligned to procurement-style searches rather than dozens of “we serve X town” pages that attract domestic price shoppers.
Many modern websites are built with page builders or JavaScript-heavy frameworks. That is not automatically bad. The problem is when critical content is not reliably available in the initial HTML, or when internal links are not true links.
Google can render JavaScript, but it is slower, and it adds another point of failure. On complex sites, that can mean:
If your rankings are inconsistent and your pages look fine to humans, this is often where the issue sits.
Speed is a ranking factor, but it is not a silver bullet. The real reason to care is conversion.
If your site takes too long to load on a mobile connection, the right prospect never sees your proof. They bounce back to Google, click the next contractor, and you never know you lost the job.
For complex websites, performance issues usually come from oversized images, too many scripts from tracking and plugins, and heavy themes. The right approach is measured: improve the pages that drive enquiries first (service, location, and quote pages), not just a homepage score.
There is a trade-off here. If you strip out everything for speed, you can damage tracking, lead capture, or usability. The goal is not a perfect score. It is a fast, stable experience that supports enquiries.
Contractors often get advised to create lots of location pages. Done carefully, that can work. Done lazily, it creates near-duplicate content that drags the whole site down.
Google is not judging you morally. It is judging usefulness. If 40 pages say basically the same thing with the town name swapped, Google has little reason to rank them.
A better approach is to treat location targeting as a credibility exercise. You prove you operate there with project work, logistics, accreditations, client types, and specifics that a real competitor would struggle to fake. That takes more effort, but it attracts a different calibre of enquiry.
Technical SEO is also about helping search engines interpret your business accurately.
Structured data (schema) can clarify your organisation details, services, reviews (when eligible), and location information. It will not magically rank you, but it can reduce ambiguity and improve how your listing appears.
More importantly for your bottom line, it supports trust. When your site clearly shows who you are, where you operate, and why you are credible, you get better clicks and better leads.
If you have ever redesigned a website and rankings dipped for months, that is usually not Google “re-learning” you. It is a technical failure.
Common issues include broken redirects, changed URL structure without a plan, internal links pointing to old pages, and removing content that was quietly pulling in traffic.
A proper migration plan is tedious, but it protects revenue. Map old URLs to new ones, preserve important on-page content, audit for 404s, and keep tracking clean so you can see what actually happened.
If you have paid for an “audit” before and it was a 60-page PDF full of generic advice, you already know the problem: most audits are designed to impress, not to execute.
For technical seo for complex websites, the output should be a prioritised plan tied to outcomes. Not just “fix duplicate titles”, but which templates, which sections, what the risk is, and what the expected impact is.
You also want clarity on effort. Some fixes are a 30-minute change. Others require development work, template changes, or content restructuring. If an agency cannot tell you what is involved, they are guessing.
Complex sites fail when people do tasks in the wrong order. Publishing more pages on top of technical problems is like painting over damp.
Start by confirming the site is crawlable and indexable in the way you intend. Then clean up bloat and duplication, tighten the architecture, and only then scale content.
After that, focus on the pages that make you money. In construction, that is usually a small set of high-intent services and priority areas, supported by case studies that prove you have done the work.
If you add paid media into the mix, the technical side matters even more. Fast pages, clean tracking, and a site that is easy to navigate are what turn ad spend into leads instead of expensive clicks.
If your site is underperforming and it has any combination of multiple locations, a big service catalogue, a history of redesigns, or a page builder setup, you are firmly in “complex website” territory.
You do not need an agency that sells you a promise. You need a clear plan, implemented by the person who understands the technical detail and is accountable for the result.
If you want a straight-talking technical audit and an execution plan tied to enquiries, Wicked Spider® does this work day in, day out – and we deliberately take on only four new clients per month. If that level of focus appeals, you can start a conversation at https://wickedspider.com/.
A helpful way to think about technical SEO is this: it is not “extra”. It is the part that decides whether all the effort you put into your reputation, your projects, and your content actually shows up where buyers are looking.
