Technical SEO Audit Checklist for Small Business Websites

Most small business websites do not lose rankings because of content, they lose them because of avoidable technical debt. A technical SEO audit finds the blockers that stop Google from crawling, indexing, and trusting your pages. Here is the exact checklist we run at Alloy1Consultants, in the order we run it.

1. Crawlability

Before anything else, confirm Google can reach your pages. One stray directive can hide an entire site.

• Open robots.txt and confirm there is no site wide Disallow: / left over from staging.
• Confirm robots.txt references your sitemap.xml.
• Check that no important page carries a noindex meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header.
• Make sure every page is reachable from at least one internal link, orphan pages rarely rank.

2. Indexation

Crawled is not the same as indexed. Compare the number of pages you expect to rank against what Google actually holds.

• Search site:yourdomain.com and compare the count to your sitemap entries.
• Review the Pages report in Search Console and read every Not indexed reason.
• Set a self referencing canonical on each page, and never canonicalize a unique page to your homepage.
• Pick one canonical host (www or non www) and 301 redirect the other.

3. Core Web Vitals and speed

Speed is a ranking signal and a conversion signal. Test on mobile, on a throttled connection, not on your office fiber.

• LCP under 2.5 seconds, CLS under 0.1, INP under 200 milliseconds on mobile.
• Serve images as WebP, size them correctly, and set explicit width and height to stop layout shift.
• Preload the hero image and lazy load everything below the fold.
• Split large JavaScript bundles so first paint is not blocked by code the page does not need yet.

4. On page and structured data

• Unique title under 60 characters and description under 160 characters on every page.
• Exactly one H1 per page, with H2s that mirror real buyer questions.
• ProfessionalService or LocalBusiness JSON LD with a NAP that matches your Google Business Profile exactly.
• BreadcrumbList and FAQPage JSON LD where the page genuinely contains those elements.

5. Internal linking and site structure

Internal links tell Google which pages matter. Small sites win by pointing authority at a handful of money pages.

• Every blog post links back to the service page it supports, using descriptive anchor text.
• Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage.
• Fix broken internal links and redirect chains, each hop leaks crawl budget and speed.

"Technical SEO does not make a site rank, it removes the reasons it cannot."

How often to audit

Run a full audit twice a year, and a lightweight check every month: Search Console coverage, Core Web Vitals, and broken links. Most regressions come from a redesign, a plugin update, or a new page template, so audit immediately after any of those.

Want the audit done for you?

Our Technical SEO Audit service delivers a prioritized list of fixes with the expected impact of each. Request a free audit and we will show you the three issues costing you the most visibility right now.