Technical SEO covers a lot of ground, and it's easy to get lost in what to check first. This is a practical, ordered checklist - the fundamentals most small business sites get wrong, and the ones that matter most before you spend time on anything else.
1. Confirm Google Can Actually Find Your Site
- [ ] Your site has a valid XML sitemap submitted in Google Search Console.
- [ ] Your robots.txt file isn't accidentally blocking pages you want indexed (our robots.txt guide covers the rules that most often go wrong).
- [ ] Important pages don't have a stray
noindextag left over from a staging build. - [ ] Duplicate or parameter URLs point a canonical tag at the version you want ranked (see our canonical tags guide).
If Google can't crawl and index a page, nothing else on this list matters for it. This is the first thing to verify, not the last.
2. Fix Broken Links and Redirect Chains
- [ ] No internal links point to 404 error pages.
- [ ] Old URLs that have moved use a single 301 redirect - not a chain of three redirects stacked on top of each other, which wastes crawl budget and dilutes link equity.
- [ ] External links you reference still resolve (not pointing to dead third-party pages).
3. Check Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
- [ ] Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift all fall within Google's "good" thresholds. See our full guide on Core Web Vitals.
- [ ] Images are compressed and served in modern formats (WebP/AVIF rather than uncompressed JPEG/PNG).
- [ ] Nothing render-blocking is loading before your main content.
4. Get Your On-Page Basics Right
- [ ] Every page has a unique
<title>tag and meta description. - [ ] There's exactly one H1 per page, with a logical heading structure beneath it (H2, then H3 - no skipped levels).
- [ ] Images have descriptive alt text (helps both accessibility and image search).
5. Make Sure Structured Data Is in Place
- [ ] Key pages carry relevant schema markup - Organization/LocalBusiness at minimum, plus Article or FAQ markup where it applies.
- [ ] Structured data validates cleanly in Google's Rich Results Test.
6. Verify Mobile and HTTPS Basics
- [ ] The site is fully usable on mobile - text readable without zooming, buttons easy to tap, nothing overflowing the viewport.
- [ ] The entire site runs on HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings (why HTTPS and security headers matter).
- [ ] There's no duplicate content accessible on both
http://andhttps://, orwwwand non-wwwversions of the same URL.
7. Review Internal Linking
- [ ] No orphan pages - every page has at least one internal link pointing to it.
- [ ] Your most important pages (key services, cornerstone content) receive internal links from elsewhere on the site.
- [ ] Anchor text is descriptive, not generic "click here" links. Full guide: internal linking for SEO.
How Often to Run This
A full pass through this list is worth doing quarterly, or after any significant site change - a redesign, a CMS migration, or a big content push. Smaller checks (broken links, new pages missing metadata) are worth a quick look monthly.
The Fast Way to Run All of This
Working through every item manually takes time most small business owners don't have. AuditCrow's scan checks the majority of this list automatically - crawlability, speed, structured data, mobile usability, and more - and returns a prioritised, plain-English report so you know what to fix first. For the full picture on what "technical SEO" actually covers, see what is a technical SEO audit, or run a free website audit to get your own checklist scored automatically.