"Technical SEO" sounds like something only developers should touch. In practice, most of it is a short, checkable list — and a surprising number of small business websites fail two or three items on it without anyone noticing, because none of these issues stop a site from looking fine to a human visitor. They only stop it working properly for Google.
This is the same checklist we work through on the technical side of every SEO report we run. You don't need to be technical to check most of it yourself.
1. Does your robots.txt file allow Google in?
Your `robots.txt` file tells search engines which parts of your site they're allowed to crawl. Visit `yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt` right now. If it exists, check it isn't accidentally blocking your whole site with a line like `Disallow: /` under `User-agent: ` — this happens more often than you'd think, usually left over from a staging site that never got switched back.
2. Does your sitemap actually list every real page — and nothing else?
Your XML sitemap (usually at `yoursite.co.uk/sitemap.xml`) is the map you hand Google. Two common failures:
- Pages missing from it. New blog posts, portfolio items, or service pages added after launch but never added to the sitemap — Google may take far longer to find them.
- Pages that shouldn't be in it. Old URLs, admin pages, or duplicate parameter versions of the same page (`?ref=`, `?utm_source=`, etc.) that dilute the sitemap's usefulness.
A sitemap that's hand-maintained will drift out of date the moment someone forgets to update it after publishing new content — which is exactly why we generate ours automatically from the site's own data rather than editing it by hand.
3. Are there crawl errors or broken redirect chains?
When a page moves, it should 301-redirect straight to its new address — once. A common problem after a redesign is a chain: page A redirects to B, which redirects to C, which finally reaches the real page. Each extra hop wastes crawl budget and slows the visitor down. Google Search Console's "Page Indexing" report will show you crawl errors and redirect issues for free if you have it set up.
4. Do you have "soft 404s" or duplicate pages?
A soft 404 is a page that says "Sorry, this doesn't exist" or shows an empty results page, but still returns a normal 200 OK status instead of a proper 404. Google treats these as real, thin pages — which can drag down how it judges the rest of your site. Duplicate pages (the same content reachable at two different URLs) cause a similar problem: Google has to guess which version to trust, and often picks neither.
5. Does every page have one clear H1, and a sensible heading structure underneath it?
Each page should have exactly one `<h1>` that describes what the page is about, followed by `<h2>`s and `<h3>`s that break the content into a logical hierarchy — not headings chosen for font size, but for structure. Skipping straight from an H1 to an H4, or using three H1s on one page, makes it harder for Google (and screen readers) to understand what matters most on the page.
6. Are any pages accidentally set to `noindex` — or is a private page leaking into search?
Two opposite versions of the same mistake:
- A real page carries a stray `noindex` meta tag (often left over from a staging environment) and silently disappears from Google
- A page that should be private — a test page, an old promotional landing page, an internal tool — has no `noindex` tag and ends up indexed, sometimes outranking the page you actually want people to find
Both are invisible unless you specifically check for them, which is why they're one of the first things we look at in a report.
7. Is your site on HTTPS everywhere, with no mixed content?
HTTPS has been a baseline ranking signal for years, but the more common issue now is mixed content — an HTTPS page that still loads an image, script, or font over plain HTTP, which browsers flag as insecure and some will silently block.
8. Are your image files pulling their weight?
Missing `alt` text on images isn't just an accessibility gap — it's a missed opportunity for Google to understand what the image shows, and it matters more for local businesses whose photos (of premises, products, or completed work) are often the most distinctive content on the page.
9. Does your content get properly indexed if it depends on JavaScript?
If key content (prices, service lists, contact details) only appears after JavaScript runs, some crawlers — particularly AI crawlers powering tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity — may never see it at all. This has become more important, not less, as AI-driven search has grown.
Turning a checklist into a plan
Checking all of this yourself is possible, but two things are hard to do without help: knowing how much each issue actually matters* for your specific site, and getting a clear, ranked plan out the other end rather than a long list of things that all feel equally urgent.
That's the difference between a checklist and a report. Our free SEO report runs through everything above — plus Core Web Vitals, content quality, and schema markup — and comes back with each issue marked Critical, High, or Medium, so you know what to fix this week versus what can wait. See how it compares to our full audit option, or read more about what your overall health score actually means.