Technical SEO Checklist for Small Sites
Most small sites do not need an SEO strategy. They need eight technical things fixed, and most of them are already broken by default.
Technical SEO gets sold as something complicated. On a site with under a few hundred pages it is a short list, most of it is one-time work, and the majority of small sites have three or four of these wrong right now.
This is the list I work through, in the order I work through it. I rebuilt this site recently and audited all 105 of its pages against exactly this.
1. Can Google see the content at all
Open your page and view source, not inspect element. If the article text is not in the HTML, you are relying on Google to run your JavaScript, which it does, but later and less reliably than you would like.
This is the single biggest issue on modern sites built with a front-end framework, and it is invisible in every other test. Everything else on this list is worthless if this one is wrong.
2. One URL per page
The same content should not be reachable at four addresses. Check that these all resolve to one canonical version: with and without www, http and https, with and without a trailing slash, and index.html versus the bare directory.
Then give every page a self-referencing canonical tag. Not a canonical pointing at the homepage, which is a surprisingly common CMS default and quietly removes your whole site from the index.
3. Titles and descriptions that are not truncated
- Title: aim for under about 60 characters, with the distinguishing words first. Longer gets cut off in results.
- Description: 150 to 160 characters. Google may rewrite it, but an empty one guarantees they will.
- Both unique on every page. Duplicated titles across a site are a strong signal that the pages are not distinct.
Check for empty descriptions specifically. They are easy to miss because the page looks fine.
4. A sitemap that reflects reality
The sitemap should contain only canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs. Not redirects, not noindexed pages, not pages that no longer exist. A sitemap full of stale URLs teaches Google to trust it less.
If your site has scheduled or draft content, make sure it stays out until it is live. Submitting a URL that returns 404 is worse than not submitting it.
5. Core Web Vitals, measured on mobile
- LCP under 2.5 seconds. Usually the hero image or a web font.
- INP under 200 milliseconds. Usually too much JavaScript on the main thread.
- CLS under 0.1. Almost always images without width and height, or an ad slot that resizes.
Test on mobile, on a throttled connection. A site that scores well on your desktop and badly on a phone is a slow site as far as ranking is concerned. The WordPress-specific version of this is in WordPress speed optimization.
6. Structured data where it applies
Not everywhere. On a small site the ones that pay off are Article on blog posts, Person or Organization on the about page, and BreadcrumbList on anything nested. Validate with the Rich Results Test rather than assuming your plugin got it right.
Invalid structured data is worse than none. It gets ignored, and if it contradicts the visible page it can cost you eligibility for rich results entirely.
7. Internal links that go somewhere useful
This is the most underrated item and the cheapest to fix. Every important page should be reachable from other pages with descriptive anchor text. "Click here" tells Google nothing; "WordPress security checklist" tells it what the target page is about.
Look for orphan pages, anything with no internal links pointing at it. They are usually the pages you forgot existed, and Google treats them the same way.
8. Multiple languages, if you have them
If you publish in more than one language, hreflang has to be reciprocal and self-referencing: every version lists every other version including itself. Get one direction wrong and Google discards the whole cluster.
And translate the content, not just the navigation. A page where the menu is in Azerbaijani and the article is in English is a duplicate, not a translation.
What is not on this list
Keyword density, meta keywords, submitting to directories, and most of what gets sold as an SEO package. None of it moves anything.
Fix the eight above, then spend your time on content that answers a question better than the pages currently ranking. That is the part that actually competes.
Related
Speed specifics: WordPress speed optimization. Security: WordPress security checklist.
Другие записи
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