Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes work that lets search engines find, crawl, understand and trust your website. You can write the best service pages in Northern Ireland, but if Google can't index them, or they take ages to load on a phone, they won't perform. Use this checklist to find and fix the common problems.
1. Crawling and indexing
- Your important pages are indexed: check in Google Search Console (Pages report), or search site:yourdomain.com on Google.
- robots.txt isn't blocking important pages or the whole site. It's often left blocking after a website launch.
- No important page has a noindex tag. Website builders often have a "hide from search engines" setting that's easy to leave on.
- An XML sitemap exists and is submitted in Search Console.
- Only one version of the site loads: https, with or without www, but not all four combinations. The others redirect to it.
- Each page has a canonical address, so duplicates point to the main version.
2. Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google's Core Web Vitals measure real visitors' experience. The "good" thresholds are:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), how quickly the main content appears: within 2.5 seconds.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint), how quickly the page responds to taps and clicks: within 200 milliseconds.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), how much the layout jumps while loading: below 0.1.
Common fixes:
- Images resized and compressed, in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF where possible.
- No huge background videos or sliders slowing the first screen.
- Fewer heavy plugins, chat widgets and tracking scripts.
- Image and video spaces reserved, so the page doesn't jump as they load.
- Decent hosting: cheap shared hosting can be slow.
Check with PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.
3. Mobile
- The site works properly on a phone: readable text, no sideways scrolling, buttons easy to tap.
- Phone numbers are tappable to call.
- Forms are short and easy to fill in on a phone.
Google mainly uses the mobile version of your site for ranking, so this matters more than how it looks on a desktop.
4. Security
- The whole site loads over HTTPS, with a valid certificate and no "not secure" warnings.
- Software, plugins and themes are kept up to date.
- Search Console shows no security issues.
5. Structure and internal links
- Clean page addresses such as /boiler-servicing-bangor, not /page?id=123.
- One main heading (H1) per page, describing the page, with clear subheadings below.
- Every important page is linked from at least one other page, ideally from the menu or homepage.
- Breadcrumbs on deeper pages help people and search engines see where they are.
- No important page is more than a few clicks from the homepage.
6. Titles and descriptions
- Every page has a unique title that describes it, roughly 60 characters or fewer.
- Every important page has a meta description of roughly up to 155 characters.
- No duplicate titles across pages.
7. Structured data
- Organization or LocalBusiness markup with your name, logo, contact details and official profiles.
- BreadcrumbList, Service and FAQPage where they fit.
- Markup matches what's visible on the page. Test it with Google's Rich Results Test.
8. Errors and redirects
- No important links lead to 404 (not found) pages.
- When a page moves, the old address redirects permanently (301) to the new one.
- No chains of redirects, where one redirect leads to another and another.
- A helpful 404 page that links people back to your main pages.
9. Moving to a new website
A redesign or move to a new domain is the most common cause of sudden traffic drops. Before launch:
- List every current page address.
- Map each old address to its new one, and set up 301 redirects.
- Keep titles and content of well-performing pages, or improve them.
- Make sure the new site isn't left blocking search engines.
- Submit the new sitemap and watch Search Console closely for a few weeks.
Tools
- Google Search Console: indexing, performance, Core Web Vitals and problems.
- PageSpeed Insights: speed and Core Web Vitals for any page.
- Rich Results Test: structured data.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: the same for Bing, with its own useful site scan.
Related reading: the Search Console guide, how to write service pages that rank and the complete guide to SEO in Northern Ireland.
If you'd like a technical audit with a clear, prioritised list of fixes, our SEO service starts with exactly that.
