A version of the same question keeps turning up: why doesn't a website show up on Google for anything except the business's own name? The copy is fine. The design is fine. Nobody has touched the wording in months. And still, nothing moves. Almost every time, the actual fault sits one layer down, in the plumbing search engines use to read and rank a site, rather than in the words on the page. That plumbing is technical SEO, and it's the part of the job that never gets photographed for a portfolio.
I want to walk through what a technical SEO audit on a small business site actually involves, because “technical SEO” gets used as a vague, expensive-sounding phrase without much explanation. Most of it is checkable in an afternoon, and most of the fixes take a fraction of the time the underlying problem has already cost the site in lost visibility.
Can Google find every page you actually want found
The first thing I check isn't speed or keywords. It's whether Google can even reach the pages that matter. A site can look complete to a visitor and still be half invisible to a crawler. The usual culprits are a robots.txt file blocking more than it should (I've seen a whole /blog/ directory disallowed by accident), no XML sitemap at all, or a sitemap that still lists pages taken down two years ago. Google Search Console shows this directly under its Pages report, which most owners have never opened.
Orphan pages are the other half of this. If a page exists on a site but nothing else links to it internally, it's much harder for Google to find and much harder to rank, no matter how good the page is on its own. It matters even more if a business is moving off a website builder onto something else, since old URLs vanish and the redirects often don't get set up properly. I've written about how to move off a builder without losing your SEO for exactly that reason.
Speed: the numbers Google measures, not the ones that feel fast
Google's ranking signals include a specific set of speed measurements called Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (how long the main content takes to appear), Cumulative Layout Shift (whether things jump around while loading), and Interaction to Next Paint (how quickly the page responds once someone taps something). A site can feel fast on a fibre connection in an office and still fail all three on a customer's phone on 4G outside a shop in Hull. I check both the lab test and the real-world field data, because Google mostly ranks on the second one.
The usual offenders are large uncompressed images, fonts that block rendering while they load, and third-party scripts (chat widgets, ad trackers, booking plugins) that load before the actual content does. None of that needs a full rebuild. It needs someone to go through the results line by line and fix what's actually flagged, rather than installing another caching plugin and hoping. I've covered why a WordPress site tends to slow down and the fixes that actually move the needle in more detail elsewhere on this blog.
Mobile, structure, and the schema Google actually reads
Google indexes the mobile version of a site first, full stop, so a site that only really works well on desktop is being judged on its worst version. That covers tap targets that are too small, text that needs pinching to read, and menus that don't behave properly on a touchscreen.
Structured data, often called schema markup, is the part that gets skipped most often on small business sites. It's a block of code, invisible to visitors, that tells Google exactly what a page is: a local business, a specific service, a set of FAQs, a review. Get it right and you're the one with star ratings or an FAQ dropdown sitting in the search results. Leave it out entirely and Google is left guessing, which it does conservatively.
The local signals the generic guides skip
Most technical SEO guides are written for national or global sites, and they miss the part that matters most for a Hull business: local signals. Your Google Business Profile needs to match your website exactly, same business name, same address format, same phone number, not a version with the postcode written differently on one and not the other. Google cross-checks this, and a mismatch, even a small one, is a genuine reason a business doesn't show up in the map pack for a search like “seo specialist hull” or anything else local.
Local landing pages help too, but only when they're actually different pages with different content, not the same page duplicated with a town name swapped in. Google notices the difference between the two fairly quickly.
What I actually check first, in order
When someone asks me to look at technical SEO for their site, this is roughly the order I go through:
Search Console coverage: what's indexed, what's blocked, what's throwing errors
Core Web Vitals, on mobile specifically
robots.txt and the sitemap, checked against each other
Structured data, present and valid
Google Business Profile match against the website
Internal links between related pages
HTTPS and any redirect chains left over from old URL changes
That's the actual list. It's the same one I run through as part of the technical SEO work I do for clients, and none of it is as expensive to fix as it is to keep ignoring, because every month those problems sit there is a month of local searches going to a competitor who happened to sort theirs out first.
If you want the honest version of where you stand
I'll run this exact list against your site and tell you plainly what's actually wrong, not sell you a rolling monthly retainer to “monitor” it indefinitely. It's a fixed piece of work: an audit, a plain-English list of what's broken, and a conversation about which of it is worth fixing first.
If you'd rather talk it through before committing to anything, book the free 30-minute surgery and bring your site along. Otherwise, get in touch and I'll take a proper look.
Free 30-min surgery
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