The decisions that sink a large site are made before anyone writes a title tag.
An SEO web developer designs the schema, the generation logic and the link structure that determine whether thirty thousand pages get crawled or ignored. That work happens weeks before anything an audit would look at exists.
Three things it is not
The title gets used loosely, so it is worth being specific
- A front end developer who has read a checklist
- Knows about alt text, heading order and meta descriptions. All correct, all table stakes, none of it decides whether nine thousand pages get indexed.
- A technical SEO who files tickets
- Diagnoses well and hands the fix to somebody else. The gap between the audit and the deploy is where most of these findings die.
- An agency with a developer on retainer
- Fine for fixes. Rarely the right shape for building a system, because the work arrives as tickets rather than as an architecture.
None of those three is a criticism. They are simply different jobs, and hiring one of them for this work is the mistake.
If you are hiring one
Five questions that settle it in ten minutes
- 01
How would you deduplicate two registers that disagree?
Anyone who has done this reaches for a stable key and a per-field source of truth. Anyone who has not says fuzzy matching on name and moves on.
- 02
When would you not generate a page?
The right answer is a floor, below which a location or category gets folded upward. If they cannot name a condition for withholding a page, they will publish every permutation.
- 03
Where does proximity search run?
In the database with a spatial index. If the answer involves reading the table into application code and sorting, the site will work at a thousand records and fall over at fifty thousand.
- 04
What does your sitemap look like at 30,000 URLs?
Sharded into segments, so indexation can be read per segment. One flat sitemap gives you a single opaque number and no way to find what is failing.
- 05
What happens to the pages when the database is down?
Nobody asks this and it separates people fast. A versioned snapshot fallback degrades one page. No fallback takes every page offline at once.
Then check the work
Ask for a live URL set rather than a case study.
Open the sitemap, look at how it is split, check what the deep pages canonicalise to, and see whether the internal links between generated pages look chosen or random. Ten minutes of that tells you more than any deck.
What I build
Systems where the page count comes out of a dataset
Directories, public registers, marketplaces and location networks. Data acquisition and reconciliation, schema design, page generation at scale, geo search, generated internal linking, claim flows and the monetization layer on top.
Three properties in production. 9,585 treatment facilities across all 50 states. 22,800 interstate exits crossed against 19,000 towing companies. 37,411 car rental locations with live geo search.
Work is white label for agencies, so most of it does not carry my name. The three above are mine, which is why they are the ones I can point at.
How to engage
Two shapes, contract only
A monthly seat at $8,000 with a six month minimum, where you set the priorities each month and I work through them. That is the usual arrangement, and it costs less than a loaded salary for someone you would spend a quarter trying to find.
Or a fixed-scope build from $5,000 to $22,000 depending on page count and how many sources need reconciling, if there is one specific thing to ship.
Where a system already exists and the job is keeping it current, the retainer starts at $3,500 a month. Nothing is billed in advance of the work it covers, on any of the three.
FAQ
Questions people ask
What is an SEO web developer?
A developer whose architectural decisions are made against how a site gets crawled and indexed, not only how it renders. In practice that means data modelling, page generation, internal linking structure, crawl efficiency and indexation diagnostics. It sits between technical SEO and backend engineering and very few people do both halves.
How is that different from a technical SEO?
A technical SEO finds the problem. An SEO web developer ships the fix, and more usefully designs the system so the problem never exists. Most audits produce findings that need an engineer who understands why they matter, and that handoff is where the value leaks out.
Do I need one, or will a normal developer do?
For a site of a few hundred hand-built pages, a normal developer is fine and cheaper. The moment page count is generated from a dataset, the decisions that determine indexation are made in the schema and the generation logic, which is before a normal developer would consider SEO to be relevant at all.
What should I look for when hiring one?
Ask the five questions listed on this page. They are answerable in a sentence each by someone who has built this and produce vague answers from someone who has read about it. Ask for a live URL set and check the sitemap and the canonicals yourself.
Do you take employment or contract roles?
Contract only, and the usual shapes are a fixed-scope build or a monthly seat at $8,000 with a six month minimum. I am not looking for a permanent role.
What is your stack?
Next.js App Router and TypeScript on Vercel, PostgreSQL with PostGIS on Supabase or Neon. Deliberately narrow, because the price and the timeline both depend on not relearning a stack per project.
Do you do technical SEO audits?
No. There are people who do that better than I would and it is a different job. I build systems and I fix architectural problems in systems I build. An audit without an engineer attached is a document.
Next step
Bring the site or the idea
Thirty minutes. An existing set that is not indexing, or a vertical you think has data behind it. Either way you get a straight read on what is actually wrong or whether it is worth building, at no charge.