Technical SEO for SaaS Startups

■ Who this is for

A good fit if your SEO ceiling is technical

• SaaS founders whose pages don't get indexed despite shipping content
• Product teams that built on a SPA and now realise Google can't see half of it
• Companies with a content team writing well, but rankings flat or sliding
• Founders who got an SEO audit back and have no idea who can actually fix it
• Teams migrating to Next.js, Astro, or another framework who want SEO done right the first time

■ Probably not a fit

We'll be honest if a different team is the right call

• Pure content marketing engagements — we don't write your blog posts
• Link building or PBN-style campaigns — not what we do
• Local SEO or Google Business Profile optimisation
• Sites with under 50 pages where the issue is simply not having content yet

Rendering — SSG by default, SSR for dynamic, SPA for app

Marketing pages should be static (SSG or prerender). Pages that depend on logged-in state should render server-side or remain SPA. The mistake most SaaS sites make is choosing one rendering strategy for the whole site. We split per route. Crawlers should see complete HTML on first byte for everything they need to rank.

Structured data — JSON-LD in the prerendered HTML

Service, Product, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Organization, Person — chosen per page type, not blanket-applied. We verify with Google's Rich Results Test before considering it shipped. Critically, the schema must land in the static HTML, not be inserted later by JavaScript — we have seen many sites where the schema exists but Google never sees it.

Core Web Vitals — LCP, CLS, INP

We profile real user metrics from CrUX or your own RUM data, not synthetic Lighthouse scores. The fixes are usually the same handful of patterns: defer or remove heavy third-party scripts, preconnect to font hosts, set explicit dimensions on images, lazy-load below the fold, swap heavy fonts, replace images with modern formats. Lighthouse 100 is not the goal — passing field data is.

Indexability — robots, sitemap, canonicals, internal links

A page is not indexed unless Google can crawl it, render it, and conclude it deserves to be indexed. We check robots.txt, sitemap freshness, canonical correctness, hreflang if international, and the internal link graph that signals page importance. Orphaned pages with no internal links almost never rank.

Site architecture — flat depth, intentional clusters

Two clicks from the homepage to any important page. Topic clusters where pillar pages link to detail pages and vice versa. Avoid deep folder nesting unless the URL hierarchy adds genuine value. We restructure URL trees when needed but always with 301s and the patience to wait for Google to recrawl.

Monitoring — Search Console, log files, RUM

After the work ships, we set up Search Console properly, run weekly checks on indexation and Core Web Vitals, and monitor server log files to see what Googlebot actually crawls vs ignores. Without monitoring, you don't know whether the work paid off — you're guessing from rank trackers, which lag and lie.

Crawlability, indexability, rendering, structured data, Core Web Vitals, site architecture, on-page signals. You get a written audit with a prioritised fix list — not a generic PDF, not a sales document.

Robots, sitemap, canonical, broken redirects, indexation issues, missing meta — the changes that ship in the first sprint and start moving Search Console signals immediately. We do these before touching anything that takes longer.

Move marketing pages to SSG or prerender. Verify the rendered HTML matches what users see. Check that JavaScript-injected content (titles, schema, internal links) actually lands in the static output. This is where most SaaS SEO work breaks silently.

Add JSON-LD per page type. Verify with Google's Rich Results Test. Check that the schema is in the prerendered HTML, not inserted later. Add Organization, BreadcrumbList, and Article or Service schemas across the site as appropriate.

Profile real user metrics. Fix LCP (defer scripts, preconnect fonts, optimise hero images), CLS (set image dimensions, reserve space), INP (split long tasks, defer non-critical JS). Re-measure with field data, not Lighthouse.

Rebuild navigation, footer, and contextual internal links to signal page importance properly. Set up Search Console correctly, configure indexation monitoring, and check server logs for Googlebot crawl patterns. Hand over a written runbook of what to watch and when to act.