Technical SEO audits routinely arrive as a 200-row spreadsheet in which everything is red and nothing is prioritised. Most of it does not matter for a 40-page business site.
Here is what does, in the order worth doing it.
First: can Google see your pages at all?
- Check the index count. In Search Console, Pages report. If you have 40 pages and 6 are indexed, nothing else on this list matters yet.
- Read the exclusion reasons. Discovered – currently not indexed usually means thin or duplicate content. Crawled – currently not indexed means Google looked and was not impressed.
- Check robots.txt is not blocking anything important. This breaks entire sites more often than it should.
- Check for stray noindex tags, especially on pages moved from a staging site. A forgotten noindex is the single most common catastrophic finding in audits.
- Submit a sitemap and make sure every URL in it returns 200. A sitemap full of redirects and 404s wastes crawl budget and trust.
Second: does each page have one address?
- One canonical version — http or https, www or not, trailing slash or not. Pick one, redirect the rest.
- Self-referencing canonical tags on every page.
- No duplicate content across URLs with parameters. Common on filtered category pages.
- Case consistency. On case-sensitive hosting,
/seo-services/and/seo/are different URLs, and one of them is a 404.
Third: speed, on the device people use
Test on a mid-range Android on 4G, not a laptop on office wifi. The usual offenders are unoptimised hero images, too many font families and a head full of analytics tags. Detail in Core Web Vitals on Indian networks.
Fourth: structure Google can follow
- Every important page reachable in three clicks from the homepage.
- Internal links with descriptive anchor text. Not click here. This is free and consistently under-used.
- One H1 per page, describing that page specifically.
- No orphan pages. If nothing links to it, it will not rank.
- Breadcrumbs on anything deeper than one level.
Most technical SEO problems are not exotic. They are a noindex tag, a blocked folder, or a page nothing links to.
Fifth: schema that earns something
Add the types that can change how your result looks:
- LocalBusiness if you have a catchment area, with details matching your Business Profile exactly.
- FAQPage on pages with genuine questions.
- Product with price and availability for ecommerce.
- Article on blog posts.
- BreadcrumbList so results show a path instead of a URL.
Validate it. Broken schema is worse than no schema.
What to ignore
- Keyword density. Not a thing.
- Meta keywords tag. Unused for over a decade.
- Chasing a perfect audit score. Tools flag issues by pattern, not by impact.
- Minor heading hierarchy warnings on pages that read fine to a human.
How often
Full pass twice a year. Index coverage monthly. Check after every site change, because that is when noindex tags and broken redirects appear.
Want us to run this on your site? Get a free audit.