Guides
Technical SEO Checklist for Small Business Websites
A no-fluff technical SEO checklist for small sites: what technical SEO covers, the checks that matter most, and how to work through them in priority order.
Run a fresh DomainLens audit and use the report as your priority list.
What technical SEO covers, and what it does not
Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines crawl, render, and index a site reliably. It is the foundation under your content: if Google cannot reach a page, read its HTML, or decide which URL to index, no amount of good writing will rank it.
It does not include the content itself, keyword choice, or link building — those are separate disciplines. Technical SEO is about removing the obstacles between your pages and the index, then keeping the page experience fast and stable.
For a small business site the list is shorter than the enterprise version, but the order is the same: make pages reachable, make them indexable, help discovery, then improve performance. Work top-down — there is no point on structured data for a page Google cannot crawl.
Crawlability and status codes
- Important pages return 200 OK; broken pages return a real 404 (or 410), not a 200 with empty content (a soft 404).
- robots.txt allows the pages you want crawled and points to your sitemap.
- Redirects use 301 for permanent moves and avoid long chains (A → B → C); each hop wastes crawl budget.
- Every important page is reachable through a crawlable internal link, not only via the sitemap.
Indexability
- No accidental noindex in the robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag header on pages you want ranked.
- Each page has a self-referencing canonical, or one that points to the correct preferred URL.
- One hostname only: www vs non-www and http vs https resolve to a single canonical version via redirects.
- Thin or duplicate template pages are consolidated, noindexed, or made genuinely unique.
Discovery: sitemaps and structure
- An XML sitemap lists your canonical, indexable URLs only — no redirects, 404s, or noindexed pages.
- The sitemap is submitted in Google Search Console and referenced in robots.txt.
- For multilingual sites, hreflang tags are reciprocal and include an x-default.
- The internal link structure keeps important pages within a few clicks of the homepage.
Structured data and metadata
- JSON-LD structured data matches the visible content and validates without errors.
- Titles and meta descriptions are unique per page and not truncated awkwardly in the SERP.
- A single, descriptive H1 per page with a logical heading order beneath it.
- Open Graph and Twitter Card tags render a correct preview when the page is shared.
Performance: Core Web Vitals
- LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, and CLS under 0.1 — judged on real field data, not a single lab run.
- Mobile is checked separately from desktop; problems usually surface on mobile first.
- Render-blocking scripts and unoptimised hero images are addressed before micro-tweaks.
How to work through this checklist
Go top-down: crawlability first, then indexability, discovery, metadata, and finally performance. A page blocked at step one cannot benefit from anything below it, so fixing in order avoids wasted effort.
Run DomainLens on a representative page of each template to collect the baseline, fix the highest-impact issues, and re-check the production URL to confirm each fix actually shipped.