What technical SEO actually covers (and why owners should care)
Technical SEO is the plumbing of your website. It decides whether Google can find your pages, read them, store them in its index and show them to people on a phone with a patchy 4G connection. Content and links matter, but they cannot help a page that Google never indexes.
When I audit a business website, the technical problems I find are rarely dramatic. They are small things that pile up: a plugin that set key pages to noindex, a sitemap full of old URLs, a homepage image that takes six seconds to load. Each one quietly costs enquiries.
The good news is that most of this can be checked in an afternoon with free tools. Google’s own Search Central documentation is the best reference for how crawling and indexing work, and it is written in plain enough language for a business owner to follow.
Below is the checklist I use, in the order I use it. If you want the wider picture first, my piece on why a website is not getting leads covers the non-technical causes too.
Step 1: Make sure Google can crawl and index your pages
Start here, because nothing else matters if your pages are not in Google’s index. Set up Google Search Console if you have not already. It is free, and it is the only place where Google tells you directly what it sees on your site.
Crawling and indexing checks
- Search “site:yourdomain.com” in Google. This gives a rough idea of how many pages are indexed. If your 40-page site shows 6 results, something is wrong.
- Open the Pages report in Search Console. Look at the reasons pages are not indexed, such as “Excluded by noindex tag”, “Crawled, currently not indexed” or “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”.
- Check robots.txt. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line like Disallow: / blocks your whole site. I still see this on sites that were launched straight from a staging copy.
- Check for stray noindex tags. In WordPress, look under Settings, Reading for “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. Make sure it is unticked on a live site.
- Use URL Inspection on your top pages. Test your homepage, main service pages and contact page one by one, and request indexing after any fix.
A common mistake is treating “Crawled, currently not indexed” as a technical bug. Often it is a quality signal: Google saw the page and did not think it was worth storing. Thin location pages copied with only the city name changed are a typical example.
Want more customers from Google?
Message me on WhatsApp with your website and I’ll tell you what’s holding it back and where to start.
Step 2: Clean up your sitemap, URLs and redirects
Your XML sitemap is a list of the pages you want Google to index. It should contain only live, indexable pages that return a 200 status, with no redirects, no 404s and no pages you have set to noindex.
- Submit the sitemap in Search Console and check it shows “Success” with a sensible number of discovered URLs.
- Pick one version of your domain. https with or without www, but only one. The others should 301 redirect to it in a single hop.
- Fix redirect chains. If page A redirects to B, which redirects to C, point A straight to C. Chains slow crawling and waste the value of old links.
- Find broken internal links. A free crawler such as Screaming Frog (up to 500 URLs in the free version) will list every internal link that returns a 404.
- Keep URLs short and readable. /local-seo-services/ is better than /page?id=482&cat=7. Do not change working URLs just to tidy them, though, unless you redirect properly.
Example: a clinic moves from an old website to a new one and the developer forgets redirects. Every old URL that had links or rankings now returns a 404. This is one of the fastest ways to lose traffic overnight, and it is completely avoidable with a redirect map made before launch.
Step 3: Check mobile experience and Core Web Vitals
Google indexes the mobile version of your site, and in India the large majority of your customers will see you on a phone first. So test on a real, mid-range Android phone, not just on your office laptop.
Core Web Vitals are Google’s measures of real-user experience. According to web.dev’s explanation of the thresholds, a page is rated “good” when, at the 75th percentile of visits:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is 2.5 seconds or less. This is how quickly the main content appears.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is 200 milliseconds or less. This is how quickly the page responds to a tap.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is 0.1 or less. This is how much the layout jumps around while loading.
Where I usually find the speed problems
- Huge hero images uploaded straight from a camera or phone. Compress them and serve WebP.
- Page builders loading sliders, animations and fonts that nobody needs.
- Too many plugins, especially several doing the same job.
- Cheap shared hosting with slow server response, sometimes located far from your audience.
- Chat widgets, pop-ups and tracking scripts all loading before the content.
Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for real-user data, and use PageSpeed Insights to see which elements cause the problem. Be realistic: you do not need a perfect score of 100, you need pages that load quickly and do not frustrate visitors.
Step 4: Fix on-page technical basics
These are small, repetitive items, but they affect how your pages appear in results and whether people click.
- One unique title tag per page, with the main service and location where relevant, ideally under 60 characters.
- A unique meta description that reads like an invitation, not a list of keywords. Google may rewrite it, but a good one still helps.
- One clear H1 per page that matches what the page is about.
- Canonical tags pointing to the preferred version of each page, especially on e-commerce sites with filter and sort URLs.
- Alt text on meaningful images, describing the image in plain words.
- Duplicate content checks. Product variants, tag archives and printer-friendly pages can create many near-identical URLs.
- HTTPS everywhere, with no mixed-content warnings from images or scripts loaded over http.
If you run a multilingual site, for example English and Hindi or Odia versions, add hreflang tags so Google shows the right language to the right user. International businesses serving the UK, US and UAE with separate pages need the same.
Step 5: Add structured data and prepare for AI search
Structured data (schema markup) helps search engines understand who you are, what you offer and where you are. For most business websites I start with three types:
- Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage or contact page, with name, address, phone and opening hours that match your Google Business Profile.
- BreadcrumbList on inner pages so your site structure is clear.
- FAQPage, Product or Article where the content genuinely fits. Do not mark up content that is not visible on the page.
Test your markup with Google’s Rich Results Test and fix any errors. Rank Math or Yoast can handle most of this on WordPress without code.
Clean technical foundations also matter for AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews, which need to fetch and understand your pages before they can recommend you. Do not accidentally block their crawlers in robots.txt if you want to be cited. I explain the wider approach in my guide on AI SEO, and it is a big part of my AI SEO services.
Practical next steps: how much effort this takes and when to get help
For a typical small business site of 10 to 50 pages, a first technical pass takes one to two days if you are comfortable with WordPress. Larger e-commerce sites with thousands of URLs, or sites that have been migrated badly, need more time and someone who has handled these issues before.
Here is the order I would follow this week:
- Set up Search Console and check the Pages report for indexing problems.
- Check robots.txt, noindex settings and your sitemap.
- Fix broken links and redirect chains.
- Run your five most important pages through PageSpeed Insights and fix the biggest images and scripts.
- Review titles, meta descriptions and H1s on your service pages.
- Add basic LocalBusiness or Organization schema and test it.
- Repeat a lighter check every month, and always after a redesign or plugin update.
Get help if you see a sudden drop in indexed pages, you are planning a website migration, or speed fixes keep breaking your layout. Technical fixes are usually the first stage of my SEO services, and you can compare scope in the SEO packages. If you also rely on walk-in customers, pair this with my notes on how to rank your Google Business Profile.
If you would like a second pair of eyes, request a quick SEO audit at technosubrat.in/contact or message me on WhatsApp, and I will point out the technical issues worth fixing first on your site.
Want help getting more customers from Google?
Message me on WhatsApp with your website. I’ll reply with a quick review and the first things I would fix.