Big sites break quietly.
A named GPTBot rule voids your wildcard directives. Bot Fight Mode returns 403 to Googlebot. Half your hreflang pairs point at redirects. None of it reaches a dashboard. I find it, tell you which of the dozens of findings actually matter, and take the fix to your developers myself.
Martin StepanekDeveloper-led enterprise technical SEO consultant
A small number of long engagements.
This is what lands in your backlog.
Real rows from real audits, anonymised and condensed. Finding a hundred issues is easy. Telling you which four to do first is not.
Nothing at this scale announces itself.
A misconfigured directive throws no error. Indexation decays over weeks, and by the time a report shows it the quarter is gone. These are my own numbers, not an industry study.
Contain at least one critical finding. Not because these teams are careless, but because nobody was looking at the layer it lives in.
Findings, ranked, each with an effort estimate and the exact place it lives.
URLs and 150+ languages on the largest site I work on, where one bad directive quietly removes a whole market from the index.
Four ways in.
Technical SEO Monitoring
It opens with the full audit, then stays on: robots.txt, sitemaps and uptime checked every few minutes, indexation and Core Web Vitals as the data lands. A call each month to go through what changed, and a shared Slack channel for your engineers in between.
Technical SEO Audit
A full crawl, render and log-file pass. Dozens of findings, each naming the exact place it lives and the fix — ordered by what it earns back.
Website Migration Planning
Replatform without losing traffic: redirect mapping, parity testing and a launch checklist owned end to end.
Technical SEO Training
A day with your SEO specialists and your developers in one room, worked through on your own stack.
What happens after you book the call.
No discovery calls that go nowhere, and no lock-in beyond the three-month monitoring minimum. Scoped and priced up front, and you see the value before any money changes hands.
The first call
Thirty minutes, no cost. I open your site live and name two or three real issues. You keep them whether or not we work together.
Scoped proposal
One page: what I will look at, what you receive, what it costs. Priced up front, no hourly billing, no scope creep.
The work
Crawl, render and log analysis of your own stack — the responses your server actually sends, not what a tool exports. Findings arrive as tickets in your tracker, not a slide deck.
Shipped and verified
I stay with your developers through implementation and re-test every fix in production before we call it done.
Both of them bring up the code before the rankings.
Neither was asked to. A CEO and a marketing manager at different companies both reached for the development background as the reason it worked.
“We've been working with Martin for several years now and we truly appreciate his professional and systematic approach, which also takes our business goals into account. In addition to his deep knowledge of SEO, he's able to break down proposed strategies into actionable steps and, thanks to his previous experience as a programmer, communicate them effectively to both our editorial team and our external developers.”
“Martin's development background established a foundation for implementing sophisticated strategies, particularly technical SEO initiatives. With him, our team significantly enhanced the performance of two high-traffic websites.”
I read your codebase before your rankings.
10+ years building the web before I started fixing it: frontend, backend and architecture for high-traffic sites that had to stay up. That order is the difference. I can hold my end of the argument in your sprint planning, and your engineers get work they trust.
I still write code
Not a former developer. I build and run VitalSentinel, my own monitoring platform, so rendering, caching, build pipelines and infrastructure are current work, not a line on a CV.
I take on few clients at a time
A small number of long engagements, which is why the client list is short. The largest of them is under NDA and cannot be shown at all.
I talk to your developers directly
No account manager relaying tickets. I answer their questions in their language, and I stay in the thread until the fix ships.
You can check my thinking before you pay for it.
On what's actually changing.
Cloudflare Is About to Block Googlebot for Sites That Blocked AI Training
The 'Block AI bots' toggle you flipped last year starts blocking Googlebot too. Cloudflare now judges crawlers on every purpose – and the strictest rule wins.
Siri Removes the Last Reason to Visit a Website
This fall, Siri will answer informational questions right on the phone – no click, no referrer, no data. Most everyday searches will simply stop reaching your website.
Being Found by AI Isn't the Same as Being Known by It
Ask a model about your brand with search off. Silence means you're not in the training data – and no schema or fast server can fix it.
Let's find what's breaking quietly.
Thirty minutes on a call and I'll name the technical issues your tools are not reporting — and tell you which ones are worth a sprint.
- No cost
- No commitment
The technical SEO newsletter engineers and SEOs actually finish.
One technical SEO problem worked through in full, argued from live projects rather than other people's posts.
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