Technical SEO checklist: 24 checks for small sites

By Abiot Y. Derbie - Founder, RankEcho - Updated 2026-11-03

Before you start: what technical SEO can and cannot do

Technical SEO removes reasons for search engines to skip a page. It does not make a weak page rank. If Google can crawl and index every page and traffic is still low, the work is in content and links, not in this checklist.

Run the checklist once in full, then rerun the crawling and indexing groups each month or after a redesign, a migration or a new template.

1. Crawling: can search engines reach the pages?

Check robots.txt first. One wrong Disallow line can hide a whole folder from every search engine.

lifebylogic.com, a free psychology tests site, fixed two crawling problems in its first week, in April 2026: its old .html addresses redirected with a temporary 307 instead of a permanent 301, and some redirects went through an extra step before reaching the final address with its trailing slash. Both were changed so each old address goes straight to the final one with a 301.

• robots.txt does not block pages or folders you want in search. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and read every Disallow line.
• Important pages return status 200. Redirects go straight to the final URL, without chains.
• No server errors. Search Console, Settings, Crawl stats shows 5xx responses and average response time.
• Your firewall or CDN does not block search engine crawlers. Bot protection rules can block crawlers without anyone noticing.

2. Indexing: will search engines keep the pages?

If many good pages sit in "Crawled, currently not indexed" or "Discovered, currently not indexed", the dedicated guides below explain the causes and fixes.

• Pages you want indexed have no noindex tag in the HTML and no X-Robots-Tag: noindex header.
• Each page has a canonical tag that points to itself, or to the one version you want indexed.
• The Page indexing report, filtered to your sitemap, shows few important pages as not indexed.
• URL Inspection on your top pages shows that Google chose the same canonical you did.

3. Site structure: can search engines see how pages fit together?

Keep the sitemap in step with the site. In May 2026 lifebylogic.com found its hand-kept sitemap listed a page that no longer existed and missed eight live ones. It removed the ghost, added the missing pages, then regenerated the sitemap from its full page list so the two could not drift apart again.

Internal links are the cheapest fix on a small site. On 1 November 2026 lifebylogic.com added links from 129 guides to the one page that owns each broad search, in the words people search for, so every guide points readers and crawlers to the right page.

• Every important page has links from at least three related pages in their body text, not only menus.
• Hub pages list every page in their topic, so nothing is more than three clicks from the homepage.
• The XML sitemap lists only indexable pages that return 200, and is submitted in Search Console. Large sites split it by section.
• URLs are short, readable and stable. Parameters and session IDs do not create duplicate pages.
• Breadcrumbs show where a page sits, in the page and in BreadcrumbList structured data.

4. Page markup: can search engines understand each page?

Canonicals have to match the sitemap exactly. In May 2026 Search Console reported that Google chose a different canonical for lifebylogic.com's Flourishing Index tool: the page's canonical tag and share URL had no trailing slash, while the sitemap listed the address with one. Adding the slash to both fixed the mismatch.

• One H1 per page that says what the page is about. Menus and headers do not use H1 to H3 above it.
• A unique title tag and meta description on every page.
• The main content is in the HTML the server sends, not only added later by JavaScript.
• Structured data matches the visible content and passes Google's Rich Results Test.
• Images have descriptive alt text and file names. The page declares its language.
• Every page shows one clear date, and it matches the dateModified in structured data.

5. Speed and mobile

Speed matters most when it is bad. Fix pages that fail Core Web Vitals; do not chase a perfect score at the cost of content work.

• Search Console's Core Web Vitals report shows few poor URLs on mobile.
• Pages work at phone width without sideways scrolling, and text is readable without zooming.
• Images are compressed and sized for the screen, in a modern format such as WebP.
• CSS, JavaScript and fonts are cached by the browser.

6. AI crawlers and AI search

AI search tools read the web through their own crawlers and through search indexes. A page blocked from them cannot be cited, however good it is.

• robots.txt allows the AI search crawlers you want, such as OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, separately from training crawlers such as GPTBot.
• Your firewall does not block those crawlers by accident.
• Important pages answer their main question near the top, in plain HTML.

Run it by hand, or let RankEcho check part of it

Every check above can be done with Search Console, a browser's view-source and Google's Rich Results Test. Keep a simple sheet with one row per check, the date you checked, and what you found.

RankEcho's free AI visibility audit runs part of this list on your homepage and the pages behind its findings: robots.txt rules for AI search and training crawlers, llms.txt, whether a page has a direct answer block, and which structured data it uses. It does not crawl your whole site or check speed. Connecting Search Console in RankEcho adds clicks, impressions and position for every page.

Sources reviewed

Search and publication principles below were checked against primary documentation. The worked examples are fictional; these sources do not establish a traffic outcome or a guaranteed ranking.

Frequently asked questions