IndieSEO guide
How to audit a small website for technical SEO
A useful technical audit is not a long checklist. It is a short, repeatable way to see how your important pages are served, linked, and described, then verify the changes you make.
1. Set the scope before you scan
Write down the pages that matter most: the homepage, important product or service pages, contact or signup paths, and pages you expect Google to surface. A small audit has a clear purpose when it starts with those URLs.
2. Check the URLs people and crawlers should reach
For each important URL, check that it loads over HTTPS, has the intended final address after any redirect, and returns a successful response. A redirect is not automatically a problem; a chain, loop, or route to an unrelated page can be.
3. Inspect the page signals
Look at the title, meta description, headings, canonical URL, robots directive, language markup, structured data, Open Graph data, and image alt text. The goal is not to make every field perfect. It is to catch missing, contradictory, or copied signals on pages that matter.
4. Follow internal links
Internal links are how visitors and crawlers move through a small site. Look for links that return an error, point through needless redirects, or send people to an old version of a page. Make sure the main pages are reachable through ordinary links.
5. Check crawl rules, sitemaps, and canonicals together
Robots rules, sitemaps, and canonicals should tell a consistent story about which URLs are public and preferred. A sitemap is a useful signal, but it is not a substitute for a page being internally linked and crawlable.
Google’s sitemap guidance and canonical guidance explain the limits of each signal.
6. Prioritize the evidence, not a score
Start with an issue when you can name the page, the observed response or markup, and the expected state. Fixes become safer when they are tied to evidence instead of a generic recommendation.
7. Make one change, then check again
Keep the before-and-after state clear. Rescan the relevant URL or site after the change. That confirms what your site serves now; it does not by itself prove a ranking, indexing, or traffic outcome.
Use Google’s view when the question is about Google
After a technical fix, use Search Console’s URL Inspection tool when you need Google’s reported view of a URL. Search Console can also request a recrawl for a small number of pages, though it cannot promise an immediate change in search results.
Read Google’s guidance on asking for a recrawl.