Technical SEO is the unglamorous half of getting found on Google: not the content, but whether search engines can find, read, and trust your site at all. It's also where most small-business websites quietly bleed — a duplicate domain here, a pile of dead URLs there — and no amount of good content ranks on a technically broken site. This is the exact checklist we work through on real sites (including our own), in the order that matters.
1. One canonical host
Your site should answer on exactly one address. If www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com both load without one redirecting to the other, Google sees two sites and splits your ranking signals between them. Pick one, 301-redirect the other, and make sure HTTP redirects to HTTPS. We've seen Google index half a site under each host — fixing it is one rewrite rule.
2. robots.txt and an XML sitemap
Your robots.txt should allow crawling and point to your sitemap. The sitemap should list every page you want indexed — and nothing else — with honest last-modified dates. Then submit it in Google Search Console. This is the cheapest "please crawl me properly" signal that exists.
3. Clean up dead URLs — the right way
Sites accumulate corpses: old platforms, retired products, restructured blogs. Each kind needs a different answer. Moved content gets a 301 redirect to its new home (recovering its history). Gone-forever pages should return 410 ("gone"), which tells Google to drop them fast and stop wasting crawl budget. Leaving dozens of 404s makes your whole domain look broken — we've watched a site's indexed pages shrink month after month for exactly this reason, and recover once the dead URLs were handled.
4. Canonical tags on every page
A self-referencing <link rel="canonical"> on each page tells Google which URL is the real one, protecting you from query-string and duplicate-path accidents.
5. Titles, descriptions and one H1
Every page needs a unique title (the search-result headline), a meta description worth clicking, and exactly one H1 that says what the page is. Obvious — and skipped on most of the audits we do.
6. Structured data (schema)
JSON-LD markup tells Google what things are: your Organization and logo, each Service you offer, FAQs (which can earn rich results), and Article data on posts. It's invisible to visitors and gold to crawlers. Validate it — broken schema is worse than none.
7. Speed and Core Web Vitals
Page speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor. The big wins, in order: convert images to WebP (we've cut photos from 400KB to 130KB with no visible change), set width and height on every image so the layout doesn't jump while loading, lazy-load below-the-fold images, and don't ship megabytes of unused scripts.
8. Mobile-first, actually
Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If menus, forms or text break on a phone, that's the version being judged. Test the real thing, not the desktop preview.
9. Social cards (Open Graph)
Not strictly a ranking factor — but when your links render as a blank grey box on WhatsApp and LinkedIn, nobody clicks, and shares are how new sites earn their first real visitors. One image and a few meta tags fix it sitewide.
10. Search Console: your feedback loop
Set up a Domain property (it captures www, non-www, HTTP and HTTPS together), submit your sitemap, and then actually read two reports monthly: Page indexing (is Google keeping your pages, and why not?) and Performance → Queries (which searches you're surfacing for — your next content ideas are in that list).
Technical SEO won't rank you on its own. It removes the reasons you can't rank — and for most small-business sites, those reasons are the whole problem.
Want this done for you? This checklist is literally our SEO & website optimisation service — a plain-language audit first, then the fixes, for businesses anywhere in the world. Send us your site and we'll tell you honestly what's holding it back.