Technical SEO is the set of fixes that let search engines and AI assistants crawl, understand and index your website. This checklist covers the essentials every small business site should check.
Crawling and indexing
- Confirm robots.txt does not block important pages or CSS and JavaScript files.
- Make sure important pages are indexable and not set to noindex by mistake.
- Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Fix 404 errors and broken internal links.
- Use canonical tags to avoid duplicate versions of the same page.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
- Aim for Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less.
- Compress images and use modern formats such as WebP.
- Remove unused plugins and scripts.
- Use caching and compression.
Mobile and structure
- Use a responsive design with readable text and tappable buttons.
- Give each page one H1 and a logical heading order.
- Use clean, short, descriptive URLs.
- Link important pages from your navigation and from related content.
Structured data and security
- Add schema markup for your business, services, FAQs and articles.
- Serve the whole site over HTTPS and redirect HTTP to HTTPS.
- Keep WordPress, themes and plugins updated and use security headers.
Monitor
Review Search Console monthly for indexing, mobile usability and Core Web Vitals reports, and re-crawl the site after major changes.
Frequently asked questions
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO optimises a website’s infrastructure so search engines can crawl, render and index its pages efficiently.
How often should I run a technical SEO audit?
At least twice a year and after any redesign, migration or major plugin change.
Need help with this?
Our Technical SEO service can handle this for you. Request a quote.