Technical SEO and AI visibility: audit, fixes and ongoing care for WordPress and shops

SEO agencies deliver copy and strategy, but the technology underneath often gets left behind: slow pages, missing structured data, redirect chains, wrong hreflang tags and sitemaps without modification dates. I take care of that technical part. Copy and topics stay with you or your agency, and I work alongside them.

Technical SEO in three packages

1. Assessment: the technical SEO audit

• Search Console via the API: queries, positions and clicks per page over 90 or 180 days, and which of your pages compete for the same terms
• Core Web Vitals with Lighthouse: measured per page type, on mobile and desktop
• Indexing: what Google knows, what it does not, and why
• Structured data: present, valid and matching the content
• Redirects: chains, loops, 302 instead of 301, links that go nowhere
• Security: open interfaces, outdated plugins, missing security headers

The result is a findings report with priorities: what has an immediate effect, what can wait and what is not worth doing.

2. Fixes: technical SEO optimisation

• Speed: images in the right size and a modern format, fonts from your own server, only the JavaScript the page actually needs
• Structured data: Service, FAQ, Breadcrumb and Organization as JSON-LD, products for shops
• hreflang and language versions: every language with its own URL and its own slug, all versions pointing to each other
• A sitemap with real modification dates instead of one date for every page
• Clean 301 redirects: one hop to the target instead of chains
• Cookie-free analytics with Plausible: you see every visitor, not just the ones who accept the cookie banner

3. Ongoing care

Once a month you get a report from Search Console and Plausible: which terms are rising, which pages are losing ground and what changed technically. After changes to the site I check that the sitemap, redirects and structured data still hold.

What AI visibility means technically

ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers read websites differently from people. Nobody can promise you that your site will show up there as a source, me included. What can be done technically is to make sure it gets read and understood correctly:

• llms.txt: a text file in the root directory that tells AI systems who you are, what you offer and which pages matter
• Structured data: the same JSON-LD that Google reads for search results also helps language models attribute service, location and provider
• Quotable paragraphs: clear statements with place, responsibility and figures instead of marketing speak. A paragraph that makes sense on its own can be quoted
• Deciding on bot access: in robots.txt you decide whether crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot may read your site. Either can be right, it just should be a decision and not an accident

Under the label GEO, generative engine optimization, this is currently being sold as a new discipline. Most of it is good technical SEO, done properly. I do not promise rankings in ChatGPT or on Google, nobody controls those.

Signs that the technology is the problem

• Search Console shows plenty of impressions but hardly any clicks, or your pages sit beyond page three for good
• Several of your own pages show up for the same query and take each other's position
• Lighthouse on mobile shows less than 90 for performance or accessibility
• New pages take weeks until Google knows them, or Search Console reports “Discovered, currently not indexed”
• The English version runs under German URLs, or Google shows the wrong language

Done on my own site first

Everything on this page I did on markusstoeger.com before offering it:

• Search Console via the API: the analysis in September 2026 showed several of my pages competing for the same terms. Titles, copy and links have been split up since
• A sitemap with real modification dates: the date comes from the source files, not from hand. Before, the home page reported a date from May although it had been reworked over the summer
• hreflang and English URLs: since 26 September 2026 every service page has an English slug, old URLs redirect to the target with a single 301, hreflang for German, English and x-default
• Structured data and llms.txt: every service page with Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList, the business as ProfessionalService, plus an llms.txt. AI crawlers are deliberately allowed in robots.txt
• Plausible instead of Google Analytics: in the week of 1 to 7 September 2026, Google Analytics behind the cookie banner saw only about 2 % of the visitors Plausible counted

For ROC Sports, a headless shop with a Next.js frontend, WooCommerce and JTL-Wawi, I cut the home page HTML from 755 to 304 KB. Lighthouse performance on mobile went from 70 to 97–99 (15 Sep 2026).

How to start

Send me your site's URL and, if possible, read access to Search Console. You get an honest assessment of whether an audit is worth it. A quote follows a conversation, because every site is built differently.

You run an agency yourself and need someone to build things? There is a separate page for that: Development partner for agencies.