GuideTechnical SEO Checklist for Local Business Websites
Crawling and Indexing
- robots.txt does not block important pages or resources
- An XML sitemap lists only indexable, canonical URLs and is submitted in Search Console
- Every money page returns a 200 status and is not marked noindex by mistake
- No orphan pages: each important page is linked from somewhere else on the site
Duplicates and Canonicals
- One preferred version of the domain (https, with or without www) with 301 redirects from the others
- Consistent trailing slashes and canonical tags pointing to the preferred URL
- Thin tag, author or attachment pages either improved or kept out of the index
Core Web Vitals
Google’s “good” thresholds are LCP (largest content shown) at or under 2.5 seconds, INP (responsiveness) at or under 200 milliseconds and CLS (layout stability) at or under 0.1, measured on real visits. The usual fixes are lighter themes, optimized images with explicit sizes, fewer third-party scripts and good hosting with caching. Our WordPress development team implements these directly.
Structured Data
Organization, LocalBusiness (or a more specific type such as Restaurant or Plumber), Service, BreadcrumbList and Article schema help search engines understand your business. Values must match what is visible on the page and on your Google Business Profile. You can draft LocalBusiness markup with our free schema generator.
Site Migrations and Redesigns
Most traffic losses after a redesign come from missing redirects. Before launch we crawl the old site, map every URL with traffic or links to its new equivalent, keep proven titles and content, and monitor Search Console after launch.
Internal Linking
Hub pages (services, industries) should link to every related detail page, and detail pages should link back and across to closely related topics with descriptive anchor text. This helps authority flow to the pages that generate leads, which is how this website itself is structured.