Technical SEO Checklist for Small Business Websites

Confirm you're indexed at all

Search `site:yourdomain.com.au`. If pages are missing, nothing else on this list matters yet. Search Console's Pages report names the exact exclusion reason for each URL, which is faster than guessing. We wrote a full diagnostic for this in why is my site not showing up in Google.

Hunt for stray noindex tags

The single most common serious fault we inherit is a `noindex` left over from staging, or WordPress's "discourage search engines" checkbox still ticked. Check the page source, and check the HTTP headers too — `X-Robots-Tag` is easy to miss because it never appears in the HTML.

Read your robots.txt properly

A `Disallow: /` blocks everything. More subtly, blocking `/wp-content/` can stop Google rendering your CSS and JavaScript, which means it judges your page on a broken version of itself. Block admin paths, not assets.

Check canonicals point somewhere sensible

Every page should either canonicalise to itself or deliberately to a chosen duplicate. Plugins and migrations routinely leave every page canonicalising to the homepage, which quietly removes your whole site from the index.

One hostname, one protocol

`http://`, `https://`, `www.` and non-`www.` should all resolve with a single 301 to one canonical version. Four accessible versions of the same site splits your authority four ways. Test each by hand — this takes two minutes.

Measure Core Web Vitals on mobile

Use PageSpeed Insights on a real page, not the homepage, and read the field data rather than the lab score. Oversized images are the usual culprit; see Core Web Vitals in plain English for what each metric actually measures.

Crawl your own internal links

Screaming Frog's free tier crawls 500 URLs. What you're looking for is orphan pages — pages with no internal links pointing at them. A page nothing links to is a page Google treats as unimportant, no matter how good it is.

Then, and only then, the refinements

Structured data, image compression, hreflang, pagination handling. All worth doing, none worth doing before the seven above. Our schema markup guide covers which structured data types are actually worth the effort.