How to run a technical SEO audit on a small business website

Fibvo editorial · 31 August 2026 · 5 min read

Your website was rebuilt last year. Enquiries from Google have slowed, the content has not changed, and the developer says everything is fine. The cause is rarely one dramatic error. It is usually a handful of small ones that stop search engines finding, reading or trusting the pages that matter. A small business can find most of them in an afternoon with two free tools and a spreadsheet.

Set up the two tools you need

You need Google Search Console and a crawler. Search Console shows what Google has actually seen and indexed. A crawler shows what your site looks like to a bot that follows every link from the home page. The gap between those two views is where most problems sit.

• Verify a Domain property in Search Console with a DNS TXT record. It covers the http, https, www and non-www versions of your site in one place.
• Install a desktop crawler. Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a free version that suits most small sites, and there are several alternatives.
• Open a spreadsheet with five columns: URL, issue, page value, fix and date fixed. Every finding goes in here, not in someone's memory.

Compare what is crawled with what is indexed

Run the crawl from your home page with default settings. Then open the Page indexing report in Search Console and read the reasons listed for pages that are not indexed. Three patterns deserve attention.

• Important pages marked 'Excluded by noindex tag'. This often comes from a template, an SEO plugin setting or a box ticked during the build.
• Pages marked 'Blocked by robots.txt'. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and read every Disallow line. Rules match the start of a path, so 'Disallow: /service' added to hide one test page also blocks everything under /services/.
• Pages marked 'Crawled - currently not indexed' or 'Discovered - currently not indexed'. Google knows these URLs exist but has not kept them. On a small site, this usually points to weak content or pages that nothing links to.

Then use the URL Inspection tool on your five most important pages. It shows whether each page is indexed, which canonical URL Google selected and how the page rendered. If the rendered view is missing your main text, that content depends on scripts Google is not processing the way you expect.

Clean up redirects and broken links

Redesigns change URLs. When old addresses are not redirected, links from other websites and saved bookmarks land on error pages. Filter your crawl by response code and work through what it finds.

• Internal links returning 404: edit the link in your content so it points to the live page. Do not use a redirect to patch a link you control.
• Redirect chains, where one URL redirects to a second that redirects to a third: point the first straight at the final destination.
• Temporary 302 redirects used for permanent moves: change them to 301 so the intent is unambiguous.
• Old URLs in the 'Not found (404)' list in Search Console: redirect each one that had traffic or links to the closest matching live page. Sending everything to the home page does not work, because Google usually treats those as soft 404s.

Clean the sitemap and see which page groups fail Core Web Vitals

An XML sitemap should list only the URLs you want indexed: live pages that return a 200 status, carry no noindex tag and name themselves as canonical. Load the sitemap into your crawler and remove anything that redirects or errors. Resubmit it in the Sitemaps report. Google ignores the priority and changefreq fields, so skip them. An accurate lastmod date is worth keeping.

Next, open the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. It groups similar URLs and rates each group on loading, responsiveness and visual stability, with mobile and desktop shown separately. Note each group rated poor or in need of improvement, with the template it uses, such as product pages, because a group usually fails for one shared reason. The data comes from real Chrome users, so a low-traffic site may show nothing. Record that too. Do not start fixing here. Our post on what actually slows a website down covers the fixes, cheapest first.

Decide what to fix first

A crawler will report hundreds of warnings. Most will not affect your enquiries. A missing meta description on an old news item is not why your leads fell. Score each issue on two questions: does it stop a valuable page being crawled or indexed, and how many pages does it touch?

An audit is not a list of everything wrong. It is a short list of what stops your best pages being found.

• This week: anything that keeps revenue pages out of the index, such as stray noindex tags, robots.txt rules, key pages returning errors or canonical tags pointing at a staging domain.
• This month: broken internal links, redirect chains, unredirected old URLs with backlinks and a sitemap full of dead addresses.
• This quarter: page groups failing Core Web Vitals, duplicate title tags and missing meta descriptions.
• Not at all: warnings on pages you never want in search, such as login screens, cart pages and thank-you pages.

After each batch of fixes, request indexing for the changed pages in URL Inspection and note the date in your sheet. Re-crawl a month later to confirm nothing has crept back. Then put the next audit in the calendar for the week after any redesign, platform migration or bulk content upload, because that is when these problems return.

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Written by Fibvo — Bengaluru and Erode, India — working with clients in other time zones. Questions, or think we have it wrong? Tell us.