Technical SEO checklist for small business websites.
Technical SEO makes sure search engines can crawl, understand and index your pages, and that visitors get a fast, stable experience. The checks below cover access, duplicates, speed and structured data, and Google publishes the thresholds that count as a good experience.
By Neural Media Labs6 min read
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1. Crawling and indexing
- Your robots.txt does not block pages you want found, nor your CSS and JavaScript files.
- Important pages do not carry a noindex tag, and return a normal 200 status.
- Pages that no longer exist return a real 404, not a page that says "not found" with a 200 status.
- Every important page is reachable through normal links, not only through search boxes or scripts.
- Your site is verified in Google Search Console so you can see indexing problems.
2. Duplicates, canonicals and URLs
- Each page has one preferred URL, declared with a canonical tag.
- Choose one trailing-slash policy and one protocol and host (for example https, one hostname) and redirect the rest.
- Redirects are permanent (301 or 308), go straight to the destination and never loop.
- Tracking parameters do not create separate indexable pages.
3. Sitemap
Provide an XML sitemap that lists the canonical URLs you want indexed, and reference it in robots.txt. Keep it free of redirected, blocked or noindex pages.
4. Page experience and Core Web Vitals
Google's web.dev Web Vitals guidance defines good thresholds at the 75th percentile of real visits:
| Metric | Measures | Good |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | Loading | 2.5 seconds or less |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | Responsiveness | 200 milliseconds or less |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | Visual stability | 0.1 or less |
- Do not lazy-load the main image at the top of the page.
- Give images and embeds set dimensions so the layout does not jump.
- Compress images and use modern formats such as WebP.
- Remove third-party scripts you do not need.
5. Structured data
Structured data gives search engines explicit clues about a page. Google's introduction to structured data says it can make pages eligible for richer results, but not guaranteed, and that markup must reflect what users can see. Use JSON-LD, match it to the visible page and test it with Google's Rich Results Test.
6. Mobile and rendering
- The mobile version has the same important content as desktop.
- Critical content and metadata are in the HTML that is delivered, not only added later by JavaScript.
- The site uses HTTPS everywhere.
We can run these checks as part of an SEO audit or fix them as part of our SEO service. Clean technical foundations also help your AI search visibility.
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