Technical SEO for a company site: the checklist that actually works

A lot of businesses start SEO at the far end of the road: writing content and building links while the site itself has a basic fault. Technical SEO is the layer underneath. It does not build rankings on its own; it is what allows everything else to have an effect.

1. Can Google see the page at all?

This is the most elementary failure and still the most common one. We have seen sites sit live for months with a noindex tag on them, added during development and never removed at launch. The same goes for a line in robots.txt that blocks a directory and nobody remembers why.

2. One address per piece of content (canonical)

If the same content can be reached from several addresses — with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, with tracking parameters attached — Google has to guess which one is the original. The canonical tag removes that ambiguity. There is a subtler mistake we meet often, though: pointing the canonical of every page at the home page. Google then treats the rest of the site as duplicates of the home page and drops them from the index.

3. A sitemap that matches reality

A sitemap should list only addresses that genuinely exist, return a 200 and can be indexed. Listing a 404, a redirected URL or a noindex page does nothing except turn into an error in Search Console. Declare the sitemap in robots.txt as well.

4. Structured data

Structured data (JSON-LD) tells Google what is on the page: an organisation, a service, an article, a product, a navigation trail. For a company site the minimum useful set is Organization at site level, WebPage and Service on the service pages, BlogPosting on articles, and BreadcrumbList for the trail. It only works if it agrees with what the page actually shows; markup that claims something the page does not contain does more harm than good.

5. Internal linking

A page that nothing links to effectively does not exist — not for a visitor and not for a crawler. If you have an important service page that can only be found through the sitemap, put it in the menu or link to it from the body of related pages. Internal linking is the cheapest tool in SEO and the one most often ignored.

6. More than one language, if you have one

This is where we see the most damage. A pattern common on Iranian sites, and on bilingual sites generally, is to keep both languages on a single address and swap the content according to where the visitor appears to be. Google then sees and indexes only one version — usually whichever one its US-based crawler was served — and the other language is invisible, however much was spent writing it. The fix is structural: give each language its own address and have the two declare each other with hreflang.

If two languages live at one address, one of them does not exist as far as Google is concerned.

7. Keep watching

1. Connect Search Console and verify ownership.
2. Read the Indexing report monthly: which pages are not indexed, and why.
3. Check the page experience report for slowness your visitors are actually feeling.
4. After every large release, run a few key pages through the URL inspection tool.

Technical SEO is not an exciting one-off project; it is maintenance. The difference is that when it is right, every unit of budget you put into content and brand earns something back — and when it is broken, none of it does.