Technical SEO Checklist for Small Business Owners & Beginners

The below article is a detailed checklist of everything Admarkon does as an SEO company for their digital marketing services. Some of the points in the checklist may seem a bit difficult while others may seem simple. Each of the tasks can go deep and in detail. Optimise in moderation unless specified explicitly. For instance, keyword optimisation should be done moderately while page speed optimisations should be practised aggressively. We will add a note below each task on how you should progress with each task.

As a digital marketing company with SEO as our core service, we ensure that we do not practice tactics that are in the grey or black areas. Commonly referred to as black hat SEO or grey hat SEO, these are techniques that are unethical or on the borderline. Admarkon recommends white hat SEO practices. The results may be slow, but the results are far more effective and efficient over the long term. With that said, we recommend (like every other company in the world) creating content. Good content with good value will attract users to your website. Your content should be valuable, informative, and entertaining. Unless you are creating a white paper or a thesis, try to create content that’s easy to read, entertaining, and easy to understand.

Technical SEO does not rely on the content but on the design and development part of the website itself. In many ways, technical SEO is site-specific. On-page SEO is page-specific.

Begin with Blank: Create a blank page. No content. Just the design. This will help you understand how your design is performing without the content. All the changes you make will be based on the design at the first stage. It is important to optimise the design of the website first before you proceed to optimise the other sections of the website.

1. Create a new page. Remove all the content. Leave all other elements, including the navigation, logo, header, and footer, in place.
2. Use PageSpeed Insights tool at https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to analyse the blank page. The results you get from this page will help you get an idea of what’s right and wrong with your web page.

How you proceed depends on your expertise in the platform. If you are not sure about how to go further, you should get help from a professional. A good website designer or a developer with moderate knowledge of web development should be able to help you with the results.

At this stage, it is important to ensure that all factors on PageSpeed Insights are addressed to their best to ensure that the performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO factors achieve at least a 90% ranking.

I recommend that you take a look at Google PageSpeed recommendations and more details at https://developers.google.com/speed.

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Basic Technical Foundation for Technical SEO

1. Use HTTPS: HTTPS is the standard now and ensures your website uses a secure connection. This is mandatory and has a big impact on SEO. Sites without HTTPS connections will rank much lower than those with HTTPS. Your hosting provider should be able to help you with the HTTPS settings. Most SSL certificate providers are free and will be available for 90 days, which can be renewed automatically.
2. Set up Google Analytics: Google Analytics will not affect the performance of your website but will help you understand your audience. Google Analytics helps track website traffic, user behaviour, performance, their location, devices used, etc. This could be valuable information for optimising your website in the future. This information will prove valuable, especially when optimising pages and on-page SEO.
3. Verify and submit on Google Search Console: Google Search Console, too, does not affect your SEO. The tool helps with various tasks, including the submission of your website’s sitemap to Google for fast crawling, understanding trends in traffic, search patterns, demographics, devices used to browse your website, etc.
4. The next step is to create a sitemap. The sitemap file is usually created automatically with plugins if you have WordPress as your platform. You can also create them manually, but this is time-consuming. Alternatively, you could use tools like https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to create an XML sitemap for your website. While you are creating an XML sitemap, also consider creating an HTML version that you can add to your website. Google recommendations on sitemap creation are available at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/sitemaps/build-sitemap.
5. Create a Robots.txt file: A robots.txt file will help Google and other search engines crawl relevant pages on your website. You can also specify the sitemap URL here. Create a robots.txt file easily with tools like https://www.seoptimer.com/robots-txt-generator. You should also read more on how to create the robots.txt file correctly at https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots/create-robots-txt.

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Organising Your Website for Crawlability and Indexing

6. Enhance Crawling and Indexing: Websites that are small are often indexed fully. A 5–10-page website can be easy to crawl for search engines, provided they have links to all the pages from the homepage. For larger sites, things get a bit complicated. Ensure that your website is easily crawlable. Provide links from the header area and footer area to relevant pillar content, which links to subpages. Crawling happens through links. Ensure that there are links to all your content. When you have a website with over 100 pages, this may be complicated. Do not stuff all the links onto the homepage. Categorise it correctly and provide links to subsections on each page. This ensures that the content is crawled and indexed systematically. The Google Search Console tool should help you find pages that are not crawled or indexed. Use the Google Search Console tool regularly and check the Settings -> Crawl Stats section to find details on your crawl reports.
7. Fix Crawl Errors: Address issues reported by Google Search Console on crawl errors. If you find an error or if your page isn’t crawled, check what’s wrong with the page and ensure that the page is linked from at least one other page of your website that is already crawled. A page that is not linked to is referred to as an orphan page. Orphan pages are not crawled as Google does not know how to find them. Though you may have these pages listed in the sitemap, Google may or may not crawl a page that is orphaned and listed on the sitemap.
8. Check Crawl Depth: A webpage should be accessible in 3 clicks from the homepage. That’s the optimum depth. Any further and your chances diminish rapidly. Unless you have more than a few hundred pages, your site structure could get complicated very fast. Be mindful of your website structure at all times. Try to reduce the crawl depth to a maximum of 3.
9. Fix Orphan Pages: Orphan pages are pages that do not have any links to them. They are like an island with no means to reach them. Create links to orphan pages. To identify orphan pages, you will require tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog. You can also do it the hard way using Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, but that could take a long time for larger sites.
   Reference: https://ahrefs.com/blog/orphan-pages/
10. Fix Broken Pages: If you have deleted a page on your website that was crawled by Google previously or changed the URL of the page, you may find a 404 error. 404 errors are not a good sign for both your website and user experience. You can either redirect the 404 broken URL to a new page or recreate the page with the content. You can find 404 pages on Google Webmaster Tools under the Indexing -> Pages section.