Technical SEO checklist for small sites

Technical SEO audits from big tools run to hundreds of warnings, and most of them don’t matter on a 20-page business website. Missing alt text on a decorative divider is not why you’re on page three.

This is the list we run on small sites before launch and when we take one over. It’s in rough order of how much damage each problem does, and every check can be done with free tools. Tick them off as you go.

Can Google get in?

These come first because if any of them fail, nothing else on this list matters.

• The site isn’t set to “discourage search engines”. WordPress dashboard > Settings > Reading. The box should be unticked on a live site.
• robots.txt isn’t blocking anything important. Visit yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt. A typical WordPress file blocks /wp-admin/ and little else. Disallow: / under User-agent: * blocks the lot. Google’s introduction to robots.txt explains the syntax and, usefully, what robots.txt can’t do: it stops crawling, but it isn’t a reliable way to keep a page out of results.
• Key pages aren’t set to noindex. Run your homepage and main service pages through URL Inspection in Google Search Console. Each should say the page is on Google.
• There’s an XML sitemap and Google has read it. With Yoast SEO or Rank Math it’s at /sitemap_index.xml. In Search Console > Sitemaps, the status should be Success with a recent read date. If the sitemap lists thank-you pages, tag archives or test pages, exclude them in your SEO plugin.

If any of these fail and you can’t see why, our article on why your website isn’t showing up on Google goes through the diagnosis step by step.

One version of every page

Google should see exactly one address for each page. Duplicates split your signals and confuse reports.

• HTTPS everywhere. Type http://yourdomain.com.au into a browser. It should jump straight to the https version with a padlock and no warnings. If the padlock is missing on some pages, look for images or scripts still loading over http (called mixed content).
• www or non-www, not both. Try both versions of your address. One should redirect to the other in a single step.
• Canonical tags point to the right page. View the page source (right-click > View page source) and search for “canonical”. It should point to the page’s own preferred address. Yoast SEO and Rank Math both set this automatically, and you only need to override it for genuine duplicates. Google’s guide to consolidating duplicate URLs covers the edge cases.
• No near-identical pages competing. Copy-paste suburb pages, or two service pages with the same text, show up in Search Console under “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”. Merge them or make them different.
• Clean, readable addresses. /hot-water-repairs/ rather than /?page_id=482 or /services-2/. Don’t change addresses on an established site without setting redirects.

Nothing broken

• No broken internal links. The free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers almost any small business site. Run it, then filter by Response Codes > Client Error (4xx). Fix the link at its source rather than redirecting around it.
• Old addresses redirect. If the site has been rebuilt, check Search Console > Pages for “Not found (404)” entries that used to be real pages, and 301 redirect each to its closest match.
• No redirect chains. Screaming Frog’s Redirects report shows addresses that redirect to an address that redirects again. Point the first one straight at the final destination.
• A helpful 404 page. Type a nonsense address on your site. You should get a branded page with a search box or links to your main services, not a blank error.
• Forms actually send. Not strictly SEO, but a site that ranks and then loses the enquiry has failed anyway. Submit every form and confirm the email arrives, including in the client’s inbox rather than only the developer’s.

Fast enough on a phone

• PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages. Run them through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile tab first. If there’s a section showing what real users experience, that matters more than the score below it.
• Images sized for the web. The usual culprit on small sites is a 5 MB photo straight off a phone or camera. Hero images rarely need to be more than about 2000 pixels wide, and WebP format helps.
• Caching is on. Most good WordPress hosts provide it at server level, or you use a caching plugin. Don’t run two caching plugins at once.
• Hosting isn’t the bottleneck. If even a simple page takes a couple of seconds before anything starts to appear, the server is slow, and no plugin will fix it.

Works properly on mobile

Google retired its standalone Mobile-Friendly Test in late 2023, so check this yourself.

• Open every main page on your own phone. Text should be readable without zooming, buttons should be easy to tap, nothing should run off the side of the screen, and the phone number should be tappable.
• Menus and popups behave. The mobile menu opens and closes, and no popup covers the content with a close button that’s hard to reach.
• Run Lighthouse in Chrome (right-click > Inspect > Lighthouse) with mobile selected for a more detailed report, including accessibility issues that also affect usability.

Google understands what it’s reading

• Every page has its own title tag and meta description. Screaming Frog’s Page Titles tab flags missing and duplicate ones in a few seconds.
• One clear H1 per page, and it matches what the page is about. Elementor makes it easy to style a heading big without making it an H1, or the reverse, so check the HTML tag in the widget settings.
• Images have alt text that describes them. “Switchboard upgrade in a Ballina home” rather than “IMG_4471” or a list of keywords.
• LocalBusiness schema is present and valid. Test the homepage in Google’s Rich Results Test. Our guide to schema markup for local businesses covers what to include.
• Important pages are linked from the menu or other pages. A page with no internal links pointing at it is hard for both people and Google to find.

Housekeeping

• WordPress, the theme and plugins are up to date, and you’re on a supported PHP version. Old software is the most common way small sites get hacked, and a hacked site loses its rankings fast. This is the part a care plan takes off your hands.
• Search Console has no security issues or manual actions.
• Leftover junk is cleaned up. Old demo pages, “Sample Page”, test posts and unused landing pages that are still published and indexable.

How often to run this

Most of the “Can Google get in?” settings live in your SEO plugin, so if you use WordPress it’s worth reading our Yoast SEO setup guide alongside this.

Found more problems than you’d like? Fix the first section before anything else, then send the rest to whoever looks after your site. If that’s nobody, our SEO team can work through it in order of what matters most, and if the list keeps pointing back to the build itself, it may be time to talk about a new website.