Technical SEO audit for small businesses
The website should not quietly exclude itself.
This audit checks whether a website can be found, fetched, interpreted, and considered for indexing without preventable technical obstacles.
It is the website layer of the larger local SEO audit. Google Business Profile state and contradictions elsewhere in the public footprint are examined separately.
- Starts with
- A public crawl and current page inventory
- Uses when available
- Google Search Console evidence
- Ends with
- Findings, agreed fixes, and verification
Evidence before opinion
What is checked
- URLs and responses
- Navigation links, dead pages, redirects, status codes, duplicate routes, and working files that should not be public.
- Crawl and indexing controls
- Robots rules, noindex directives, canonical declarations, and other signals that can block or redirect a crawler's attention.
- Discovery paths
- Internal links and the XML sitemap are compared with the pages that actually exist. A sitemap can help discovery; submission does not guarantee indexing.
- Page meaning
- Titles, descriptions, headings, visible text, image descriptions, and internal anchor text are checked for missing, duplicated, or contradictory information.
- First-party Google evidence
- When Search Console access is available, URL Inspection and indexing reports are used to separate live technical eligibility from Google's recorded index state.
A record someone else can check
What the client receives
- A page and URL inventory with the evidence behind each material finding.
- A distinction between confirmed defects, observations, and items that require account access to verify.
- An agreed fix scope. The audit is the diagnosis; repair work is not silently assumed.
- A change record showing what was altered and how the corrected state was tested.
- Open issues that depend on Google recrawling or making an indexing decision, labeled as open rather than reported as solved.
Not promised
No ranking, traffic, inquiry, booking, crawl date, or indexing date. The deliverable is a technically correct and verifiable site state.
Least privilege
Access follows the finding
The first pass uses the public website. If first-party evidence is needed, I ask for Google Search Console as a Full user. Temporary delegated website or hosting access is requested only when an agreed fix requires it.
I do not ask for ownership transfer, mailbox access, financial credentials, or a Google Workspace super-admin role.
Separate the layers