Technical SEO Checklist for Small Business Websites in 2025
Technical SEO does not need to be complicated, but it does need to be done. Most small business websites have at least five to eight technical issues that are quietly undermining their search performance. This is the exact 20-point checklist we run on every new client site before touching a single piece of content or link building.
Work through these in order. Fix what you find. Then check again in six months.
Points 1 to 10
1. Crawlability
Check your robots.txt file. It lives at yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt. Look for any Disallow rules that block important pages. A common mistake: developers set Disallow: / during a site build and forget to remove it before launch. That single line tells Google not to crawl anything on your site.
Fix: Remove any Disallow rules that block pages you want indexed. If you intentionally block pages (like /admin or staging paths), confirm those rules only apply to pages you genuinely do not want in Google's index.
2. Indexation Status
Go to Google Search Console and check the Coverage report. Look at how many pages are indexed versus how many are not. Then run a site:yourdomain.com.au search in Google and review the results. Discrepancies between what you expect to be indexed and what actually is indexed point to crawl or indexation problems.
Fix: Review the "Excluded" tab in Search Console. Common reasons include "Crawled - currently not indexed" (thin content or duplicate content) and "Noindex tag detected" (a developer left noindex on live pages).
3. Canonical URLs
Duplicate content is when the same or near-identical content lives at multiple URLs. A common scenario: yoursite.com.au and yoursite.com.au/ and www.yoursite.com.au all load the same homepage. To Google, these could look like three different pages with duplicate content.
Fix: Add canonical tags to every page pointing to the preferred URL. Ensure your homepage has one canonical, preferred URL and that all variations redirect to it with a 301.
4. XML Sitemap
Your sitemap is a file that lists every important page on your site. It tells Google what exists and helps ensure important pages get crawled. Most CMS platforms generate sitemaps automatically. Check that yours exists at yourdomain.com.au/sitemap.xml.
Fix: Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console via the Sitemaps section. If your sitemap is missing, generate one with a plugin (Yoast for WordPress, built-in for Shopify) or create it manually for smaller sites.
5. HTTPS
Every page on your site must load over HTTPS, not HTTP. If your site is still on HTTP, Google marks it as "Not Secure" in Chrome and it is a confirmed ranking signal disadvantage.
Fix: Install an SSL certificate (Let's Encrypt is free). Then set up 301 redirects from all HTTP versions to HTTPS, including both www and non-www variants. Test all four URL variations: http://domain.com.au, https://domain.com.au, http://www.domain.com.au, https://www.domain.com.au.
6. Mobile Usability
Google uses mobile-first indexing for all sites. The mobile version of your site is the primary version Google crawls and uses for ranking. If your site breaks on a phone, your rankings will reflect that.
Fix: Run your URL through Google's Mobile-Friendly Test. Fix any flagged issues, which are commonly: text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, and content wider than the screen. Then check your site manually on an iPhone and an Android device.
7. Core Web Vitals and Page Speed
Core Web Vitals are Google's three speed metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP, how fast the main content loads), Interaction to Next Paint (INP, how quickly the page responds to user input), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS, how much the page jumps around as it loads). Poor scores are a ranking disadvantage, especially on mobile.
Fix: Check your scores in Search Console under "Core Web Vitals" or use PageSpeed Insights. Common fixes: compress images, defer non-critical JavaScript, use a CDN, remove unused plugins, and switch to a faster hosting provider if your current one is slow.
8. Structured Data
Schema markup tells Google what type of business you are, what you offer, and how to display your information. At minimum, every local business website should have LocalBusiness JSON-LD schema on the homepage.
Fix: Add LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone, business hours, and geo coordinates. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test. Expand to FAQPage schema on service pages and BreadcrumbList for navigation structure.
9. Internal Linking and Orphan Pages
An orphan page is a page on your site that no other page links to. Google discovers pages by following links. If a page has no internal links pointing to it, Google may never crawl it, and even if it does, the page has no authority being passed to it from the rest of your site.
Fix: Use a crawler tool like Screaming Frog (free for up to 500 URLs) to find orphan pages. Then add internal links from relevant pages. Your most important pages should be linked from multiple other pages on your site.
10. 404 Handling
When a URL on your site returns a 404 error, that is a dead end for both users and Google. Every broken link wastes crawl budget and damages user experience. Worse, if external sites link to a URL that now 404s, you lose the ranking value of those links.
Fix: Use Search Console's "Coverage" report to find 404 errors. For pages that have moved, implement 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one. Create a custom 404 page that gives users a clear path forward rather than just a blank error.
Points 11 to 20
11. Redirect Chains
A redirect chain is when URL A redirects to URL B which redirects to URL C. Each hop in a chain dilutes the authority passed through the redirect and slows page load time. Chains longer than three hops are a problem.
Fix: Audit your redirects with Screaming Frog. Update any chains so URL A redirects directly to the final destination. Fix this especially for older sites that have been through multiple migrations.
12. Broken External Links
Links on your site pointing to external pages that no longer exist create a bad user experience and signal poor site maintenance. While external links are not a ranking factor, broken ones create unnecessary crawl noise.
Fix: Crawl your site with Screaming Frog or Ahrefs and filter for broken outbound links. Update or remove them.
13. Title Tags
Every page must have a unique, descriptive title tag between 50 and 60 characters. Title tags that are missing, duplicated, too long, or keyword-stuffed all hurt performance.
Fix: Audit title tags across your site. Each one should contain the primary keyword for that page, the business name, and be written for humans first. A good format: "Primary Keyword | Business Name" or "Service in Location | Business Name."
14. Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions do not directly affect rankings, but they influence click-through rates from search results. A well-written meta description is a free ad in Google's search results.
Fix: Write unique meta descriptions for every important page, 120 to 155 characters. Include the primary keyword naturally and give users a clear reason to click. Do not keyword-stuff.
15. Image Optimisation
Large uncompressed images are one of the biggest performance killers on small business sites. A 4MB hero image that takes three seconds to load on mobile is losing you both rankings and customers.
Fix: Compress all images before uploading using Squoosh, TinyPNG, or an equivalent tool. Convert to WebP format where your CMS supports it. Add descriptive alt text to every image. The alt text describes the image to Google and to screen readers.
16. Heading Structure
Every page should have one H1 heading (the main page title), followed by H2 subheadings for major sections, and H3 headings for subsections. A page with multiple H1 tags or no H1 at all creates hierarchy confusion for Google.
Fix: Audit heading structure on your key pages. Every page gets one H1. Make sure H1 content includes the primary keyword for that page. Use H2 and H3 for structure, not for making text look big.
17. URL Structure
URLs should be clean, short, and descriptive. Avoid dynamically generated URLs with long strings of parameters. A URL like /services/plumbing-adelaide outperforms /page?id=4729&cat=12 for both ranking and user trust.
Fix: Set your CMS to generate clean permalinks (WordPress: Settings > Permalinks > Post name). For existing sites with messy URLs, changing them requires 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.
18. Crawl Budget
For most small business sites under 500 pages, crawl budget is not an issue. For larger sites, or sites with lots of filtered pages (e-commerce with many URL parameters), Google may not crawl all your important pages in a given period.
Fix: Use the URL Parameters tool in Google Search Console to tell Google which URL parameters to ignore. Block low-value pages (like tag archives, printer-friendly versions) with noindex tags or robots.txt rules.
19. Hreflang for International Sites
If your site serves content in multiple languages or targets multiple countries, you need hreflang tags. Without them, Google may serve the wrong language version of your page to users in different regions.
Fix: Most Adelaide small businesses do not need this. If you do target multiple countries, add hreflang tags to every page specifying the language and country combination.
20. Search Console Errors and Manual Actions
A manual action from Google is the most severe technical SEO problem possible. It means a human reviewer at Google has found a violation of their guidelines and penalised your site. Traffic will drop suddenly and sharply.
Fix: Check the Manual Actions report in Google Search Console. If you have no manual actions, great. If you do, read the specific reason, fix the issue (commonly: unnatural links, thin content, cloaking), and submit a reconsideration request.
What to Do With This List
Do not try to fix everything in one afternoon. Prioritise. Start with indexation, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals, and structured data. Those four have the highest direct ranking impact. Then work through the rest over the following weeks.
Most small business websites can get through this list in a few hours of work spread across a couple of weeks. The payoff is a site that Google can crawl, understand, and rank without technical obstacles in the way.
If you want us to run this audit on your site and fix what we find, start here. We have done this for healthcare clinics, restaurants, and professional services businesses across Adelaide.