Technical SEO checklist for UK business websites

A technical SEO problem rarely announces itself. Pages drop out of Google, a redesign quietly loses traffic, or new pages never appear in search at all. This checklist covers the checks we run first on most business websites. You can work through most of it yourself with free tools: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and your own browser.

1. Can Google find your pages?

Before a page can rank, search engines have to be able to reach it. This is called crawling.

• Open yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt and check it doesn’t block sections you want in search. A single Disallow: / left over from a development site can hide everything.
• Make sure you have an XML sitemap, that it lists only live pages you want indexed, and that it’s submitted in Search Console.
• Check that every important page is linked from at least one other page on your site. Pages that only appear in the sitemap are easy for search engines to undervalue.
• Make sure key content isn’t only available behind a login, a form or a script that fails to load.

2. Are the right pages indexed?

Being crawled isn’t the same as being included in Google’s index. Search Console’s Pages report shows which URLs are indexed and why others aren’t.

• Look at the reasons listed under “Why pages aren’t indexed”. “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” on a page you want in search is usually a mistake worth fixing straight away.
• Check for a stray noindex setting after a launch. In WordPress, the “Discourage search engines” box under Settings, Reading is a common culprit.
• Make sure each page’s canonical tag points to the version you want to rank, not to a different page or an old domain.
• Pick one version of your site. The http, https, www and non-www versions should all redirect to a single address.
• Control near-duplicate pages, such as filtered product lists, tag archives or printer versions, so they don’t compete with your main pages.

3. Do your links and redirects work?

• Find and fix broken internal links. A crawler such as Screaming Frog (free for smaller sites) will list them.
• Make redirects go straight to the final page. Chains of several redirects slow pages down and waste crawling.
• After a redesign or platform change, check that old URLs still redirect to their closest new equivalent rather than to the homepage or a 404.
• Make sure missing pages return a real 404 status. A “page not found” message served with a normal 200 status is called a soft 404, and Search Console will flag it.

4. Is the site fast enough?

Google measures page experience with three Core Web Vitals. The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console uses data from real visitors, so start there, then use PageSpeed Insights to dig into individual pages.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): how quickly the main content appears. Google’s “good” threshold is 2.5 seconds or less.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): how much the layout jumps around while loading. Good is 0.1 or less.

The usual fixes are unglamorous: correctly sized and compressed images, fewer plugins and third-party scripts, width and height set on images, lazy loading for images further down the page, and decent hosting with caching switched on.

5. Does it work properly on a phone?

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so anything missing or broken on mobile is missing or broken for search too.

• Text should be readable without zooming, and buttons easy to tap.
• Content and internal links on desktop should also be on mobile, not hidden or removed.
• Nothing should scroll sideways.

6. Is the structure easy to follow?

• Your most important pages should be reachable within a few clicks of the homepage.
• URLs should be short and descriptive, for example /services/technical-seo/ rather than /?p=123.
• Related pages should link to each other with descriptive link text, not “click here”.
• Breadcrumbs help visitors and search engines understand where a page sits.

7. Are the on-page basics in place?

• Every page has its own title tag and meta description, written for that page.
• Each page has one clear H1 heading that says what the page is about.
• Images have descriptive alt text where they carry meaning.
• If you serve more than one country or language, hreflang tags tell Google which version to show where. If you don’t, you don’t need them.

8. Is your structured data accurate?

Structured data (schema markup) describes your business, services, articles and breadcrumbs in a format machines read easily. It helps search engines, and increasingly AI tools, understand who you are.

• Use types that match your content, such as Organization or LocalBusiness, Service, Article and BreadcrumbList.
• Only mark up what visitors can actually see on the page.
• Test pages with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator.
• Google now shows FAQ rich results for very few websites, so add FAQ markup for clarity rather than expecting a special listing.

9. Is the whole site secure?

• Every page loads over HTTPS with a valid certificate.
• No images, scripts or forms load over plain http (mixed content).

10. Can AI search tools read your site?

AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews rely on crawlers too. Check that your robots.txt isn’t blocking crawlers you’re happy to let in, and that your key pages answer common questions plainly. Our page on AI search optimisation explains this in more detail.

After a redesign or migration

Most of the serious traffic losses we see follow a redesign. Before launch, list every existing URL and map it to its new address. After launch, test the redirects, resubmit the sitemap and watch the Pages and Core Web Vitals reports in Search Console for the following weeks.

How often should you check?

A quick look at Search Console once a month catches most problems early. Run through this whole checklist after any redesign, platform change or large batch of new pages.

Want a second pair of eyes?

Our free SEO audit covers your site’s technical health, key pages and competitors, with a plain-English list of what to fix first. If you’d rather have the fixes made for you, our technical SEO team pairs an SEO specialist with an engineer who makes the changes.