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Lock & Mercer

Search and discoverability

Technical SEO is architecture. What we will not do is promise you a position.

What this is

Being findable by the people already looking.

Most of what decides whether a site is findable is decided before anyone writes a word of copy: whether each thing that could be searched for has its own URL, whether that URL says what it is, whether a crawler can reach it, and whether the page describes an entity a search engine can identify. That is architecture, and it is engineering work.

The commonest failure we see is a single-page site, one title, one description, one canonical URL, one heading, trying to rank for six unrelated intents at once. Splitting it is not a growth hack; it is giving each intent a page that can answer it. The second commonest is a migration that dropped its redirects, which is the same problem arriving from the other direction.

We will not sell you rankings. Position depends on competitors, on links we do not control, and on an algorithm nobody outside the company has seen. What we can do is make the site legible to a crawler, make each page unambiguously about one thing, and tell you honestly which of your goals is an engineering problem and which is a public-relations one.

What’s involved

Information architecture
One intent per URL, with an internal link structure that actually reaches the deep pages.
Structured data
Organization, Person, Article, Service and breadcrumb markup that describes real entities and states no fact the page does not.
Canonicals, sitemaps and redirects
Generated from the same source as the navigation so they cannot drift out of date.
Crawl and index diagnosis
Why pages are not indexed, using Search Console data rather than inference.

How it usually goes

01Crawl it
See the site the way a machine does, including what it cannot reach.
02Fix the architecture
URLs, titles, headings, internal links, redirects.
03Describe the entities
Structured data that matches the prose exactly.
04Instrument and wait
Search Console, then patience. Indexing is not immediate.

What we won’t do

  • We will not promise a ranking, a position or a traffic figure.
  • We will not buy links, spin content, or publish pages written for a crawler rather than a reader.
  • We will not add structured data that claims something the page does not say.

Where we’ve done it

  • Business Report

    An independent Kenyan business publication, rebuilt as a server-rendered newsroom its editors run themselves.

Next

If this is the shape of your problem, describe the part that breaks if it isn’t right.

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