A technical SEO checklist is a short list of checks that confirm Google can find, read and index every page you want to rank. Run it in order: crawling, indexing, sitemap, canonicals, redirects, structured data, mobile. Most small sites have two or three faults, and one of them is usually serious.
Here is why that matters. You can write the best page in Yorkshire on boiler servicing, and if a stray tag tells Google to ignore it, it will never rank. No amount of content work fixes that. Technical faults are cheap to fix and expensive to leave.
What belongs on a technical SEO checklist?
It is everything that affects whether search engines can access and understand your site, as opposed to what the pages say. Think of it as the plumbing. Nobody admires it, but when it fails, everything upstairs goes wrong.
The good news is that a small business site is rarely complicated. A 30-page WordPress site has a short list of things that can break, and you can check most of them for free in an afternoon.
How do you check site crawlability?
Start with the file at yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt. Open it in a browser. If you see a line reading Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you are telling every crawler to stay out of the whole site. It happens more than you would think. Developers block a staging site, then the setting follows the site live.
In WordPress, also check Settings, then Reading. The box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” must be unticked. Ten seconds, and it has sunk launches.
Then look at internal links. Every important page should be reachable by clicking from the homepage in three clicks or fewer. A page with no links pointing at it, an orphan, is hard for Google to find and easy for it to undervalue.
Who can do this? You can. Reading robots.txt and the WordPress setting needs no technical skill at all.
Is your site actually indexed?
Crawled and indexed are different things. Google can read a page and still decide not to keep it.
Set up Google Search Console if you have not already. It is free, and it is the only place Google tells you what it thinks of your site. Open the Pages report under Indexing. You will see how many URLs are indexed and, more usefully, a list of reasons the others are not.
Two reasons deserve attention. “Crawled, currently not indexed” often means the page is thin or near-identical to another. “Excluded by noindex tag” is fine for a thank-you page and a disaster for a service page. Check every URL in that group against your own list of pages that should rank.
A quick sanity test: type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google. If you have 40 pages and Google shows 4, you have a problem. If it shows 400, you probably have a different problem, usually tag archives or parameter URLs creating clutter.
How do you set up an XML sitemap and robots.txt properly?
The two files do different jobs. A sitemap lists the pages you want indexed. Robots.txt asks crawlers to stay away from certain areas. A sitemap is a suggestion that helps discovery. Robots.txt controls crawling but does not reliably keep a page out of the index, so use a noindex tag for that.
Your sitemap should contain only live, indexable pages that return a normal 200 response. No redirected URLs, no noindexed pages, no 404s. Most WordPress SEO setups generate one at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. Submit that address in Search Console under Sitemaps, and check the status says Success.
For robots.txt, keep it boring. Block the admin area and internal search results, point to the sitemap, and leave it at that. The more clever your robots.txt, the more likely it is to block something you need.
What do canonical tags, redirects and error pages do?
A canonical tag tells Google which version of a page is the master copy. Without one, the same page reachable at http and https, with and without www, or with tracking parameters can look like several competing pages.
Pick one version of your domain, redirect the others to it, and make sure each page carries a self-referencing canonical. View source on a few pages and search for rel=”canonical”. The URL in it should match the address in the browser exactly.
Watch for canonicals pointing somewhere unexpected. A page canonicalised to your homepage is telling Google to ignore it. That one usually comes from a plugin set up wrongly.
Broken pages are normal. Broken pages that used to rank, or that you still link to, are not.
In Search Console, the Pages report lists “Not found (404)” URLs. Anything with backlinks or past traffic should be redirected with a permanent 301 to the closest matching live page. Anything with no history can stay a 404.
Then hunt redirect chains. If A goes to B and B goes to C, point A straight at C. Chains waste crawl effort and dilute signals. A free crawler such as Screaming Frog, which is free up to 500 URLs, will list them all in minutes. That covers the typical Leeds brochure site comfortably.
Also make sure your own internal links point to final URLs, not to redirected ones. It is housekeeping, and it adds up.
Do you need structured data?
Structured data is code that labels what a page is about, so a machine does not have to guess. For most small businesses, three types cover it: Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage, Article or BlogPosting on posts, and BreadcrumbList for navigation trails.
Be sceptical of anyone selling schema as a ranking trick. It helps Google understand a page and can unlock some rich results. It will not lift a weak page. Also note that Google has cut back FAQ and HowTo rich results, so do not add that markup expecting stars or dropdowns.
Test pages in Google’s Rich Results Test. Errors there are worth fixing. Warnings usually are not.
Does mobile friendliness still count?
Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so what a phone sees is what Google sees. If your mobile layout hides text, drops images or removes links that desktop shows, you are being judged on the stripped-down version.
Open your five most important pages on a real phone. Can you read the text without zooming, tap the buttons and find the phone number? That beats any score. Speed and hosting sit slightly outside this list, and they are a job of their own.
What should you fix first?
Order by damage. Anything blocking indexing comes first: robots.txt, noindex tags, the WordPress visibility box. Second comes duplication and canonicals. Third, redirects and 404s on pages that once earned traffic. Last, schema and polish.
If you do nothing else this week, do the first group. They take under an hour and have the biggest downside if wrong. If your site is a larger build, the broader picture in our SEO service covers how audits are scoped.
Once the foundations hold, local visibility is the next lever. Our guide to optimising your Google Business Profile covers that, and a steady flow of Google reviews backs it up.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I run a technical SEO check?
Quarterly for a stable site, and always straight after a redesign, migration or plugin overhaul, because that is when things quietly break.
Can I do technical SEO myself?
Yes, for the basics. Search Console, a free crawler and ten minutes with robots.txt will catch most small-site faults. Hand it over when you meet things like JavaScript rendering problems or a migration with hundreds of URLs. Do not guess on those, because a wrong redirect map can cost you months of traffic.
Does robots.txt stop a page appearing in Google?
No. It stops crawling, not indexing, so a blocked page can still appear with no description. Use noindex.
Is a technical audit worth paying for?
Often, and you should expect a prioritised list, not a 90-page PDF of everything a tool flagged. Good audits say what to fix first and why. Bad ones dump raw warnings. Ask to see a sample before you buy.
Do GEO and AI search change the checklist?
Barely. AI answer engines still need to reach and read your pages, so crawlability matters just as much. Our explainer on generative engine optimisation covers what is different.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on yours, send over your domain and we will run these checks and tell you which three fixes matter most. Free, within one working day.
