The 12-Point Technical SEO Checklist Every Startup Needs

Most startup SEO advice is about content. Write more, write better, write consistently. All true, and all useless if search engines cannot crawl your site, cannot work out what your pages are about, or give up waiting for them to load.

This is the technical layer underneath the content. It is unglamorous, it is mostly a one-time cost, and skipping it is why a lot of good content never ranks.

Work through it in order. The early items are cheap and unblock everything after them.

1. Make sure you are actually indexed

Search site:yourdomain.com. Count the results. If the number is much lower than your page count, nothing else on this list matters yet.

The usual culprits: a noindex meta tag left over from staging, a robots.txt that disallows everything (also usually from staging), or pages that only exist after JavaScript runs. Verify the site in Google Search Console and read the Pages report — it will tell you exactly which URLs are excluded and why.

2. Give every meaningful thing its own URL

This is the single biggest structural mistake we see. A site with seven pages can rank for roughly seven things.

If you have six services on one /services page, you have one page competing for six different searches, and it will lose all six to competitors with a dedicated page each. Same for blog posts that exist as excerpts with no article behind them.

Split them. Six service pages, one per service, each with its own title, its own copy and its own target term.

The exception worth naming: content that has no search demand of its own does not need a URL. Project write-ups are the usual example — nobody searches for them, and a thin page per project is worse than a single strong index. Split what people search for; leave the rest where it is.

3. One H1, and a heading structure that means something

One <h1> per page, describing what the page is. Then <h2> for sections, <h3> for subsections, in order, without skipping levels to get a font size you liked.

Headings are how both crawlers and screen readers understand the shape of a document. Using an <h4> because it looked right is a styling decision breaking a structural contract.

4. Write titles and descriptions per page

Every page needs a unique <title> under about 60 characters, front-loaded with the thing it is about, and a <meta description> around 150 characters that gives someone a reason to click.

Duplicate titles across pages are a common and expensive default — usually from a template that never got overridden. Google will rewrite a bad description; it is less forgiving about a bad title.

5. Set canonical URLs

Tell search engines which version of a page is authoritative. Without canonicals you get the same content indexed at /page, /page/, ?utm_source=... and www. versus bare domain, splitting your authority across four addresses.

One self-referencing canonical on every page solves it.

6. Ship a real sitemap and robots.txt

Generate sitemap.xml from your content rather than maintaining it by hand — a stale sitemap is worse than none. Exclude drafts, thank-you pages and anything you do not want indexed.

Reference it from robots.txt and submit it in Search Console.

7. Add structured data

Schema markup tells search engines what a page is, not just what it says. The four that pay for themselves:

• Organization on the home page, with your real contact details and social profiles
• LocalBusiness if you have an address customers can visit
• Article on blog posts, with published and modified dates
• FAQPage where you have genuine questions and answers
• BreadcrumbList so search results show your hierarchy

Validate them with Google's Rich Results Test. Malformed schema is ignored at best.

8. Hit Core Web Vitals — and hold them

Three numbers, measured on real users, on mobile:

• Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds. Usually your hero image. Serve it in AVIF or WebP, size it correctly, mark it priority.
• Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds. Usually too much JavaScript running on the main thread.
• Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Almost always images without dimensions, or a web font swapping in and reflowing everything.

Fixing these once is a week of work. Keeping them fixed means a budget enforced in CI, because every site gets slower as features land unless something says no.

9. Get mobile right, not merely responsive

Google indexes the mobile version. That is the version that counts. Test on a mid-range Android on a throttled connection, not on your laptop with the window narrowed — that is a completely different experience from the one most of your audience is having.

Check tap targets, check that nothing needs horizontal scrolling, and check that your content is the same on mobile as desktop. Hiding sections on small screens hides them from the index too.

10. Link internally, on purpose

Internal links are how authority moves around your site and how crawlers find deep pages. Every service page should link to relevant work. Every article should link to the service it supports. Every service should link to the two nearest it.

Use descriptive anchor text. "Mobile app development" tells a crawler something; "click here" tells it nothing.

11. Handle redirects before you migrate, not after

If you are rebuilding, map every indexed URL to its new address as a permanent 301 redirect before cutover. Pull the list from Search Console rather than from memory.

This is the most common way rebuilds destroy rankings, and it is entirely avoidable. Budget half a day.

12. Measure enquiries, not impressions

Connect Search Console and analytics, then agree what success is before you start. Rankings and impressions are diagnostics. The number that matters is qualified enquiries.

If organic traffic doubles and enquiries do not move, something is wrong with the traffic you are attracting or the page it lands on — and no amount of additional traffic will fix it.

Where to start on Monday

If you only do three things: verify you are indexed, give every service and case study its own URL, and fix your Largest Contentful Paint. Those three unblock more than the other nine combined.

We do this work as part of every build, and as a standalone audit where a site already exists. If you want to know which of these twelve your site is currently failing, ask us for an audit — we will tell you the ones worth fixing and ignore the ones that are not.