You could be publishing great content every week, building backlinks, and doing everything the marketing gurus tell you — and still watch your rankings flatline. In most cases I’ve seen, the culprit isn’t the content. It’s the technical foundations underneath it. Google can’t rank a website it can’t properly crawl, index, or trust. Before you spend another hour writing blog posts or chasing links, run through this checklist and make sure your site isn’t quietly working against you.
1. Make Sure Google Can Actually Crawl Your Site
This sounds obvious, but it’s the first thing I check with every new client — and you’d be surprised how often it’s broken. A single misconfigured robots.txt file can accidentally block Google from crawling your entire site.
Visit yourwebsite.com/robots.txt and check what’s in there. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, that’s telling every search engine bot to stay away. That’s almost certainly not what you want.
Use Google Search Console to test individual URLs with the URL Inspection tool. It’ll tell you whether Googlebot can reach the page and what it actually sees when it does. Think of this as the starting point for everything else on this list.
2. Check Your Indexing Status
Crawling and indexing are two different things. Google can crawl a page and still choose not to index it — or you might have accidentally told it not to.
Search for site:yourwebsite.com in Google. The number of results gives you a rough idea of how many pages are indexed. If you’ve got 50 pages but only 8 show up, something’s wrong.
Common causes include:
- A
noindexmeta tag left over from a staging environment - Pages blocked in
robots.txt - Thin or duplicate content that Google doesn’t consider worth indexing
- Crawl budget issues on larger sites
Google Search Console’s Coverage report is the most reliable place to diagnose this. It breaks down exactly which pages are indexed, which are excluded, and why.
3. Sort Out Your HTTPS and Security
If your site is still running on HTTP rather than HTTPS, you’ve got a problem. Google confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal back in 2014, and browsers now actively warn users that HTTP sites are “Not Secure.” That warning alone will send visitors straight back to the search results.
Google’s own documentation is clear: HTTPS is expected, not optional. Getting an SSL certificate is straightforward with most hosting providers — many offer it free through Let’s Encrypt.
Once you’ve switched, make sure:
- All HTTP URLs permanently redirect (301) to their HTTPS equivalents
- Your canonical tags reference the HTTPS version
- Your sitemap only lists HTTPS URLs
- There are no mixed content warnings (HTTP resources loading on an HTTPS page)
4. Fix Your Page Speed
Slow pages frustrate users and hurt rankings. Google’s Core Web Vitals are now a confirmed ranking factor, and they’re essentially a measure of how fast and stable your pages feel to real users. The three main metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
I’ve written in more detail about website speed for SEO if you want to go deeper, but at a minimum you should be:
- Compressing and properly sizing your images (WebP format is ideal)
- Enabling browser caching and GZIP compression on your server
- Minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) if you serve visitors across the country or globally
- Removing render-blocking scripts that delay the page from loading
Run your site through Google’s PageSpeed Insights — it gives you a score and a prioritised list of what to fix. Aim for a score above 70 on mobile, though higher is always better.
5. Nail Your URL Structure and Canonicals
Messy URLs and duplicate content are two of the most common technical issues I find during audits. They’re also among the easiest to overlook.
Keep URLs Clean and Consistent
A good URL is short, descriptive, and uses hyphens to separate words. Something like /services/seo-for-small-businesses is far better than /page?id=47&cat=3. Clean URLs are easier for users to read, easier for Google to understand, and easier to share.
Deal With Duplicate Content
Duplicate content confuses Google — if the same content appears at multiple URLs, Google has to guess which version to rank, and it often gets it wrong or splits the ranking signals between them. Common causes include:
wwwvs non-wwwversions of your site both being accessible- HTTP and HTTPS versions both loading
- Trailing slash vs no trailing slash (e.g.
/aboutand/about/) - Printer-friendly or filtered versions of pages
Use Canonical Tags Correctly
A canonical tag (<link rel="canonical" href="...">) tells Google which version of a page is the “master” copy. Make sure every page has one, and that it points to the correct URL. Yoast’s guide to canonical URLs explains the implementation clearly if you’re using WordPress.
6. Submit and Maintain Your XML Sitemap
Your XML sitemap is essentially a map you hand to Google, listing every page you want indexed. Without one, Googlebot has to discover your pages by following links — which means some pages might never get found.
Generate a sitemap (most CMS platforms do this automatically, or you can use a plugin) and submit it via Google Search Console. Then check it regularly. Your sitemap should only include pages you actually want indexed — not admin pages, thank-you pages, or URLs with parameters.
According to Ahrefs’ technical SEO guide, a well-maintained sitemap is one of the simplest ways to ensure your content gets discovered and indexed promptly.
7. Optimise for Mobile
More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, and Google uses mobile-first indexing — meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking. If your site looks fine on desktop but breaks on a phone, your rankings will suffer for it.
Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check your pages. Things to look out for:
- Text that’s too small to read without zooming
- Clickable elements (buttons, links) that are too close together
- Content that’s wider than the screen
- Interstitials or pop-ups that block the main content on mobile
A properly responsive design — one that adapts fluidly to any screen size — solves most of these issues at once. If your site still uses a separate mobile subdomain (m.yourwebsite.com) rather than a responsive design, it’s worth updating. Search Engine Journal has a solid overview of why this matters in the current indexing environment.
8. Fix Broken Links and Redirect Chains
Broken links — pages that return a 404 error — are bad for users and bad for SEO. They waste crawl budget, create dead ends for visitors, and signal to Google that your site isn’t well-maintained.
Run a crawl of your site using a tool like Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or check the Coverage report in Search Console. Fix broken internal links by either updating them to point to the correct page or setting up a 301 redirect.
While you’re at it, check for redirect chains — these are sequences where URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C. Every hop in a chain dilutes link equity and slows down page loading. Ideally, every redirect goes directly from the old URL to the final destination in a single step.
Moz’s guide to redirects is worth reading if you’re not sure how to handle these properly.
9. Set Up Structured Data
Structured data (also called schema markup) is code you add to your pages that helps Google understand what your content is about. It won’t directly boost your rankings on its own, but it can earn you rich results — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, event details, opening hours — that make your listing stand out in the search results and increase click-through rates.
For a small business, the most useful schema types are:
- LocalBusiness — name, address, phone number, opening hours
- FAQPage — marks up question-and-answer content
- Review — displays star ratings in search results
- BreadcrumbList — shows your site’s navigation path in the snippet
Google’s Structured Data documentation includes a testing tool so you can check your implementation before publishing. If schema feels overwhelming, it’s something I cover as part of my SEO services — worth doing properly rather than guessing.
10. Track Everything Properly
None of this matters if you can’t measure whether it’s working. Make sure Google Analytics 4 is installed correctly and collecting data, and that Search Console is set up and verified. Between the two, you’ll be able to see which pages are getting traffic, which keywords are driving impressions and clicks, and where people are dropping off.
According to SEMrush’s technical SEO breakdown, sites that actively monitor their performance data catch issues faster and recover from algorithm updates more quickly than those flying blind. Set up monthly checks at minimum — a recurring half-hour audit is far better than scrambling to diagnose a traffic drop six months later.
Getting Your Technical Foundation Right
Technical SEO isn’t glamorous, but it’s the foundation everything else is built on. You can write the best content in your industry and still struggle to rank if Google can’t crawl your pages, your site loads slowly, or your URLs are a mess. The good news is that most of these issues are fixable — they just need to be found first.
Work through this checklist from top to bottom. Start with crawlability and indexing (nothing else matters if Google can’t reach your pages), then move on to speed, mobile, and structured data. Most of these fixes are one-time jobs that pay dividends for years.
If you’d like someone to run a proper technical audit for you and fix what they find, I’m happy to help. Get in touch for a free quote and we’ll take a look at what’s holding your site back.