Technical SEO Checklist for Business Websites

Great content cannot rank if search engines cannot find, render or understand it. Technical SEO is the foundation that makes everything else work. Use this checklist to review a business website, starting with the issues that do the most damage.

1. Crawling: can search engines reach your pages?

• robots.txt exists at /robots.txt, returns a 200 status and does not block important pages, CSS or JavaScript.
• Important pages are linked from other pages with normal HTML links, not only reachable through search boxes or scripts.
• There are no large groups of broken internal links or redirect chains.

2. Indexing: should these pages be in Google?

• Pages you want in search do not carry a noindex tag or X-Robots-Tag header.
• Each page has a self-referencing canonical tag pointing to its preferred URL.
• HTTP, HTTPS, www and non-www versions redirect to one preferred version in a single hop.
• Pages that do not exist return a real 404 status, not a 200 with an error message (a "soft 404").
• Google Search Console shows no unexpected spikes in excluded or "crawled, not indexed" pages.

3. Sitemaps

• An XML sitemap lists only canonical, indexable URLs that return a 200 status.
• The sitemap is referenced in robots.txt and submitted in Google Search Console.
• It updates automatically when pages are added or removed.

4. Rendering

Many modern sites build pages in the browser with JavaScript. Google can render JavaScript, but it adds delay and risk. Check that your important content, links and metadata appear in the HTML the server sends, for example by viewing the page source rather than the inspected page. Pre-rendering or server-side rendering solves most problems.

5. Page experience and Core Web Vitals

• Largest Contentful Paint: the main content appears quickly; do not lazy-load the hero image.
• Interaction to Next Paint: the page responds quickly to taps and clicks; avoid heavy scripts on load.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: images and embeds have set dimensions so the page does not jump.
• The site works well on mobile screens, with readable text and tap targets.
• Images are compressed, served in modern formats and sized for the screen.

6. On-page structure

• Each page has a unique title and meta description.
• Each page has one clear H1 and a logical H2 and H3 structure.
• URLs are short, readable and consistent, with or without trailing slashes but not both.
• Images have descriptive alt text.
• Internal links use descriptive anchor text that tells people where the link goes.

7. Structured data

Structured data (JSON-LD) helps search engines understand who you are and what each page is about: organisation or person details, breadcrumbs, articles and products. Only mark up information that is visible and true, validate it with Google's Rich Results Test, and remember that structured data makes pages eligible for rich results but does not guarantee them.

Where to start

Work through crawling and indexing first, because nothing else matters if pages cannot be found. Then fix page experience, then structure and structured data. If you would like a second pair of eyes, a technical SEO audit turns this checklist into a prioritised plan for your site.

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