Technical SEO · Checklists
A Plain-English Technical SEO Checklist
Eight years behind a record-store counter taught me something that turned out to translate directly into this job: a crate full of great records is worthless if they're shelved wrong. Doesn't matter how good the pressing is if a customer can't find it, or worse, finds the wrong sleeve on the right record. Technical SEO is the same problem wearing a different apron — the content can be excellent and still go nowhere if the site around it is mis-shelved. Here's the checklist that actually matters for a small-business site, in plain English, with a five-minute check for each item and a clear line for when to stop DIYing it and call someone.
The checklist
Crawlability
What it is. Whether Google's crawler can actually reach and read your pages at all — no accidental robots.txt blocks, no duplicate versions of the same URL competing with each other, no parameter sprawl turning one page into fifty crawlable variants.
Check it yourself. Search Console's Page Indexing report will show you "blocked by robots.txt" and "duplicate without user-selected canonical" directly. Also just try www and non-www, and http and https — they should all redirect to one single version, not sit there as four separate live pages.
Call someone when. If you're seeing duplicate-content warnings you don't understand, or your site runs on a platform that auto-generates URL parameters for filters and sorting, that's a technical fix, not a content one.
Indexation
What it is. Not "is my site online" but "is what's actually in Google's index the stuff worth ranking." Thin pages — a location page with two sentences of unique copy and a Google Map embed — get indexed but rarely rank, and a pile of them can drag a whole site's perceived quality down.
Check it yourself. Search `site:yourdomain.com` in Google and skim what comes back. If you see pages you forgot existed, or a stack of near-identical thin pages, that's worth a look.
Call someone when. Call someone when you've got dozens of thin pages and no clear plan for whether to improve, consolidate, or remove them — that decision affects the rest of the site's standing, not just those pages.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
What it is. In human terms: does the page feel fast when a real person on a real phone taps a link, and does the layout stay put instead of jumping around while things load. Google measures this formally, but the human version — does it feel fast — is the one that actually matters.
Check it yourself. PageSpeed Insights (free, from Google) gives you the real numbers in about thirty seconds — paste your URL in and read the "Core Web Vitals" section, not just the overall score.
Call someone when. If your score is in the red and you don't know why, or the fix involves your image pipeline, hosting, or third-party scripts, that's a call-someone problem — most speed fixes touch code you don't want to guess at.
Mobile reality
What it is. The majority of local search happens on a phone, in a parking lot, with one thumb. A site that looks fine on your laptop and requires pinch-zooming or has a nav menu that doesn't work on touch is failing most of its actual visitors.
Check it yourself. Open your own site on your own phone, on cellular data, not office WiFi. Try to tap every nav item and call-to-action with your thumb, not your fingertip precision from a mouse cursor.
Call someone when. If tapping something doesn't work, or text requires zooming to read, that's a build issue worth flagging to whoever maintains the site.
Structured data
What it is. Schema markup that tells Google explicitly what's on the page — this is a LocalBusiness, this is a Service, this is a BlogPosting by this author. Worth adding for your organization, services, and articles. Not worth adding for the sake of adding it.
Check it yourself. Google's Rich Results Test will validate whatever schema is already on a page and tell you if it's broken.
Call someone when. Skip the cargo-cult version of this — piling on every schema type a plugin offers because more markup feels like more optimization. Extra, unused, or inaccurate schema doesn't help and can trigger manual review flags. Add what's true and relevant; leave the rest alone.
Internal links
What it is. How your own pages point to each other. A site where every page links back to the homepage and nowhere else is a crate with no dividers — everything's in there, nothing's findable, and Google can't tell what's related to what.
Check it yourself. Pick five pages at random and count how many other pages on your own site link to them. If the answer is zero or one, that page is an island.
Call someone when. This one's usually a content and information-architecture fix, not a developer fix — often doable in-house once someone points out where the gaps are.
The stuff to ignore
Half of running a technical audit practice is telling people what's actually fine. A crate-digger learns fast which rumors about grading and pressing runs are worth chasing and which ones are just record-show folklore. SEO has its own folklore, and it wastes real hours if you let it drive decisions.
- Most "toxic backlink" panic. A cottage industry sells disavow-file services against links that were never going to hurt you in the first place. Google's algorithm is generally good at ignoring spammy links pointing at your site without your involvement. Disavowing is for a genuine, identifiable penalty — not a monthly subscription against a hypothetical.
- Word-count myths. There is no magic number — not 300, not 1,500, not 2,000 — that ranks a page. A page should be as long as it takes to actually answer the question completely and no longer. Padding a page to hit a word count target makes it worse, not better.
- Daily-blogging myths. Publishing volume for its own sake doesn't move rankings. One genuinely useful page a month beats four thin ones a week, every time. Frequency is not a ranking factor; usefulness is.
The five-minute version, if you only do one thing
If you're not going to work through the whole list, open PageSpeed Insights, paste in your homepage and your busiest service page, and read the Core Web Vitals section. Slow load times and layout shift affect every single visitor whether or not they know why the page feels off, and it's the one item on this list where a bad number reliably means a real, fixable problem underneath it — not folklore, not a myth, just a crate that needs re-sorting.
None of this is exotic. It's the equivalent of checking that the new arrivals bin is actually alphabetized before you worry about which artists to feature in the window. Get the shelving right first. Everything downstream of it — content, links, rankings — works better once the store itself isn't fighting the customer.
About the author
Dewayne “Dub” Sawyer
Technical SEO Lead
Dub managed an East Nashville record store for eight years and taught himself to code building its inventory site — which is how he learned that crawlability problems and mislabeled crates are the same disease. He owns our technical audits, Core Web Vitals work, and structured data.
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