Technical SEO has a reputation for complexity, mostly because the tooling is complex. The work itself is not. On a small site, four areas cause almost every problem: speed, indexing, mobile rendering, and errors. A quarterly pass over each one catches more than any new plugin.

Start with a crawl, not a tool stack

Run a free crawler over the site and export the results. You want four columns: URL, status code, title, and word count. That single sheet answers most questions. Pages returning 200 with no title, pages returning 404 that still receive links, and pages with forty words that should not exist at all.

Crawl the live site, not staging, and crawl as a logged-out visitor. Logged-in crawls hide the problems your customers meet.

Speed: measure what a visitor feels

Lab scores are useful for diagnosis, real user data is what matters. Look at the field data in PageSpeed Insights if you have enough traffic, and at your own stopwatch if you do not. Load the three most important pages on a mid-range phone over mobile data and count until the main text is readable.

Most small-site speed problems come from a short list. Uncompressed hero images. Three font families loaded in full. Chat widgets and tracking scripts fired before the first screen. Carousels that load every slide at once. Fix the images first, because that change is the largest and the cheapest.

A page that takes six seconds to show its headline has already lost the argument, whatever the copy says.

Indexing: know what is in and what is out

In Search Console, compare the pages you believe exist with the pages reported as indexed. Common surprises: important pages marked noindex from an old launch, category pages excluded because they were thin, and hundreds of filtered URLs indexed instead of the clean versions.

Decide deliberately for each template. Product pages should be indexed. Filter and sort URLs usually should not. Paginated archives are a judgement call; if they are the only route to older content, keep them crawlable and let them be indexed.

Mobile: the version most people see

Open the site on a phone and try to complete the main task: find a product, read a price, submit a form. Then check the details that break silently. Tap targets too close together. Text at 12 pixels. A cookie banner covering the only button. A form that zooms the page when a field is tapped.

Test with one hand, standing up, on a slow connection. That is closer to real use than a desktop browser resized to 375 pixels.

Errors that quietly cost you pages

Check for soft 404s: pages that return a success code but show an error message. Check redirect chains longer than one hop, and redirect loops. Check that the www and non-www versions both resolve, and that one redirects to the other with a single permanent redirect.

Then check the form path. A contact form that fails silently looks fine to a crawler and loses real enquiries. Submit it yourself once a month, from a phone and from a desktop, and confirm that the notification email arrives in the inbox rather than the spam folder.

Duplicates and canonical tags

Duplicates appear from tracking parameters, uppercase URLs, trailing slashes, and print versions. Pick one canonical form for every page and make internal links use it. Add a self-referencing canonical tag to every indexable page, and point variants at the main version.

Be careful with canonicals across languages or regions; those need their own structure rather than a single canonical.

The quarterly checklist

  • Crawl the live site and export status codes, titles, and word counts.
  • Fix 404s that still have external links; redirect them to the closest page.
  • Compress images above 200 KB and re-test the three key pages on mobile data.
  • Review the indexed versus submitted page counts in Search Console.
  • Complete the main task on a phone with one hand.
  • Submit every form and confirm the confirmation message and the notification email.
  • Check that www, http, and trailing-slash variants resolve to one URL.

Book ninety minutes each quarter. Technical problems are cheap when they are small and expensive when they have been quietly running for a year.