Capability Checks
Part of Reviewing agency capabilities by service
Assessing an agency's technical SEO evidence
Check an agency's technical SEO issue trail, diagnosis and handover without treating indexing or ranking as guaranteed.
Ask a technical SEO agency to trace one site problem from symptom to diagnosis, recommended change and follow-up. An audit score or list of warnings is less useful than an explained issue with affected pages, an implementation owner and clear limits on what the finding proves.
Request an issue trail
Ask the proposed specialist to walk through a redacted record showing the URL or page pattern, evidence examined, alternative explanations, proposed fix and check after implementation. If client details are confidential, an anonymised record can show the method. Note what the redaction prevents you from verifying.
First establish whether the issue concerns discovery, crawling, indexing, canonical selection or visibility in search results. These are different questions.
Google says a page that meets its minimum technical requirements is eligible for indexing, but inclusion is not guaranteed. A proposed fix therefore needs a checkable technical aim rather than a promise of indexing or higher rankings.
Match the record to the claim
| Agency claim | Evidence to request | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Important pages are not indexed | Page Indexing information and URL Inspection for representative pages, with the check date | The report gives an overview of URLs Google knows; inspection addresses a specific URL. |
| Crawling is blocked | The relevant robots rule and inspection of an affected URL | A blocked URL can still appear in search results. |
| Google selected an unexpected canonical | The site's stated preference and Google-selected canonical for representative URLs | A canonical preference is a hint; Google can select another URL. |
| Search visibility changed | Search Console Performance settings, dates, pages and queries examined | Clicks and impressions describe Google Search activity, not sales or the cause of a change. |
Ask how the agency selected its examples. One inspected URL may not represent every page using a template. Likewise, an unindexed URL is not necessarily a problem if it is a duplicate or a page the business does not need in search.
Agency Claims vs. Required Evidence
- Claim: Important pages are not indexed
- Request: Page Indexing info and URL Inspection (check date)
- Claim: Crawling is blocked
- Request: Relevant robots rule and URL inspection of affected page
- Claim: Google selected an unexpected canonical
- Request: Site’s stated preference vs. Google-selected canonical for representative URLs
- Claim: Search visibility changed
- Request: Search Console Performance report with dates, pages and queries examined
Test the priority and handover
Ask why the chosen issue mattered ahead of other findings. A useful explanation links the affected pages to an important user journey, describes the likely mechanism and identifies what still needs checking. The number of warnings alone does not establish priority.
Then identify who writes the specification, changes the site and checks the deployed result. If the specialist needs access to templates, logs or Search Console before diagnosing your site, that belongs in its proposed first stage. Record what its example demonstrated, what it inferred and what remains unknown for your site. A later traffic change may be relevant, but does not by itself establish that the technical fix caused it.
