SEO

Technical SEO: what a small business actually needs

What lets search engines find, read and understand your site, how to check it yourself, and the most common faults on small business sites.

By Daniel Aideborn · Published 29 September 2026 · 3 min read

Short answer: technical SEO is about search engines being able to find, read and understand the pages. At its core it is done once, and when it is done right nobody notices. The rest of being found is content: pages that answer what your customers search for.

Below is what belongs to the foundation, how to check it yourself without paying for tools, what technical SEO is not, and the faults most common on smaller businesses' sites.

The foundation

• The pages may be indexed. No page you want to be found with is blocked in robots.txt or marked noindex.
• A map of the site. A sitemap lists the pages and when each last changed, so they are found sooner.
• One address per page. The same content should not live at several addresses, such as with and without www. Where it does, a canonical link says which one counts.
• Title and description. Every page has its own title and its own short description. That is often what shows in the search result.
• Headings in order. One main heading per page, then subheadings. It helps search engines and screen readers alike.
• Speed and mobile. The page should load quickly and work on a phone. Google measures both and takes them into account.
• HTTPS. The site should only be reachable encrypted.
• Structured data. A machine-readable description of what the page is about, such as the business, questions and answers, or an article.
• Language. If the site exists in several languages, each page should say which translation belongs to which language (hreflang).

How to check it yourself

Search Console and PageSpeed Insights are free and come from Google. Search Console needs you to prove you own the domain, which is done once.

What technical SEO is not

• The content. What the pages say, and whether they answer what people search for, matters more than the technology.
• Links from other sites. They count, but they are not something built into the code.
• Meta keywords. Google stopped using them long ago.
• Keywords repeated over and over. It makes the text worse for people and does not help.

Nobody can promise a particular position in the search results. What can be promised is that the technology does not stand in the way.

Common faults on small business sites

• A noindex tag left over from the test version when the site went live.
• The site is reachable at several addresses, and none of them is marked as the real one.
• Every page has the same title, often just the company name.
• Large images loaded at full size even on a phone.
• Important information that only exists in a PDF or in an image.
• Services that have no page of their own to be found by.

What is included with me

Basic technical SEO, Google indexing through Search Console and analytics are part of every launch package. Complete Launch adds a complete SEO structure, keyword research, local SEO where relevant and performance optimisation. If you want ongoing SEO and new articles after launch, that is Liovall Growth.

What each package contains is under pricing, and what drives the price of the site itself is covered in What does a website cost for a small business?.

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