Two halves of SEO
Half of ranking on Google is about what your pages say and who links to them. The other half is whether Google can find your pages, read them properly, and trust what it reads. That second half is technical SEO, and it has a reputation for being impenetrable. It is not. It is a short list of things a website either does or does not do, and most small business sites fail two or three of them without anyone knowing.
Here is the list, in plain words.
1. Google can find every page
Google discovers pages by following links and by reading your sitemap, a file that lists every page you want indexed. If a page is not linked from anywhere and not in the sitemap, Google may never see it.
Check: your site has a sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml, it lists your real pages, and it is submitted in Google Search Console. Every important page is linked from your menu or from another page.
2. Google is allowed in
Two switches can tell Google to stay away: a robots.txt file that blocks it, and a "noindex" instruction on a page. Both are useful while a site is being built and both are regularly left on after launch.
Check: yourdomain.com/robots.txt does not contain Disallow: /. In Search Console's Pages report, your important pages are indexed, not "Excluded by noindex".
3. One address per page
Your home page can often be reached at four addresses: with and without www, with http and https. If they all work as separate pages, Google sees four copies and splits the credit. The site should pick one and send the others to it, and each page should declare its own preferred address (a "canonical" tag).
Check: type each variant into a browser. All should land on the same one. View the page source and look for rel="canonical" pointing at the page itself.
4. Every page has a title and a description
The title is the blue link in Google's results; the description is the grey text under it. They should be unique per page, say what the page is about, and be short enough not to get cut off, roughly 60 characters for the title and 155 for the description. Sites with the same title on every page, or no descriptions, are leaving the most visible part of their listing to Google's guesswork.
Check: view source on three pages and compare the <title> and <meta name="description">. Different, specific, sensible length.
5. Headings mean something
A page should have one main heading (H1) that says what it is about, and subheadings (H2, H3) that structure the content. Google uses them to understand the page. Sites built in page builders often have headings chosen for size rather than meaning, or none at all.
Check: each page has one H1 that matches the topic, and the subheadings read like an outline.
6. It is fast and works on a phone
Google measures how quickly your pages load and respond for real visitors, on their phones, and uses it in ranking. It also indexes the mobile version of your site, so if the mobile layout is missing content the desktop has, that content does not count.
Check: Search Console's Core Web Vitals report shows your pages as Good. Open the site on your phone and confirm everything the desktop shows is there.
7. It is secure and stays up
https with a valid certificate, no "not secure" warnings, no mixed content (secure page loading insecure images). A site that is frequently down or slow to respond gets crawled less.
Check: the padlock in the browser on every page. Search Console's Pages report shows no server errors.
8. It tells Google what you are
Structured data is a block of code that states, in a format Google reads directly, that this is a dental practice at this address with these hours, or that this page is an FAQ, or that this is a service with this price. It is what makes your listing show stars, hours, prices and questions in the results. Most small business sites have none.
Check: paste a page into Google's Rich Results Test. It should find at least an Organisation or LocalBusiness entry. If it finds nothing, that is a gap.
What technical SEO does not do
It does not make a thin page rank. If your services page is three sentences and a stock photo, no amount of sitemap hygiene will put it above a competitor's thorough one. Technical SEO removes the obstacles; content and reputation do the ranking. Both halves are needed, and the technical half is the one that is finished once and then merely kept.
Where this sits
Every one of the eight items above is checked and fixed as part of building a website with us, and the check is repeated monthly on a care plan, because items 2, 6 and 7 have a habit of breaking quietly. If you are looking at your own site now, Search Console's Pages report and a view-source on the home page will tell you most of it in ten minutes.