Technical SEO checklist for small websites
By the LaunchSafer team ·
The technical SEO checks that matter most for small business sites, blogs and startups — and the ones you can safely ignore.
Technical SEO is about making sure search engines can find, crawl and understand your pages. For most small websites, a short list of checks covers nearly everything.
Crawling and indexing
- robots.txt exists and doesn't block important pages. A single
Disallow: /underUser-agent: *blocks your whole site. - XML sitemap lists your important pages and is referenced in robots.txt.
- No accidental noindex. Check both the robots meta tag and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header.
- Canonical URLs point each page at its preferred address, on your own domain.
On-page structure
- One descriptive H1 per page.
- Unique titles and meta descriptions.
- Headings that don't skip levels.
- Descriptive alt text on meaningful images.
Links
- Fix internal links that return 404 or 500 errors.
- Avoid redirect chains — link directly to the final URL.
- Return a real 404 status for missing pages, not a 200 "soft 404".
Structured data
Add Schema.org JSON-LD that matches your site: Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage, Product for products, Article for posts. Validate it with the Schema Markup Validator.
Mobile
Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Make sure you have a responsive viewport meta tag and don't disable zoom.
What you can mostly ignore
Keyword density, meta keywords and exact title character counts are far less important than clear, useful content and a site search engines can crawl.