What is technical SEO, exactly?
Picture your website as a shop. Content is the window display and the shelves. Technical SEO is everything else: the front door (is it open to crawlers?), the listing in the directory (are you indexed?), the wait at the checkout (speed), and the product labels (structured data). A beautiful shop with a locked door sells nothing.
The good news for a small business: unlike content or reputation, technical SEO is a finite project. You put it in order once, check it from time to time, and it barely moves again. It is also the only SEO pillar where a 10-page website can do strictly as well as a large corporation.
Step 1: check that Google knows you exist
Everything starts with a binary question: are your pages in Google's index? Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. If nothing comes up, no other effort will pay off. The causes range from the silliest (a noindex tag forgotten since launch) to the sneakiest (a server-side block nobody ever tested).
We catalogued the seven real causes, from most to least frequent, with the test that identifies yours: read why your website does not show up on Google. It is the mandatory starting point for everything else.
Step 2: decide who gets in, classic crawlers and AI crawlers
The robots.txt file, at the root of your website, tells crawlers what they may visit. For twenty years it only concerned Googlebot and its cousins. Since 2023, a second family knocks at the door: GPTBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity. Blocking them out of a protective reflex means giving up being cited in their answers, right where your future customers already ask their questions.
Who these crawlers are, what a block really costs you and the exact lines to put in your file: our guide on blocking or welcoming AI crawlers.
Step 3: speed, measured the way Google measures it
Google grades the loading experience of your pages with three metrics, the Core Web Vitals: LCP (how long until the main content shows), INP (responsiveness when you click) and CLS (does the page jump around while loading). These are not lab scores: Google measures them on your users' real visits.
On the small-business websites we audit, three causes of slowness come up constantly: oversized images, third-party scripts piled up over the years, and undersized hosting. The thresholds to aim for and the fixes, without jargon: the Core Web Vitals guide for business owners.
Step 4: make machines understand you
A web page says "Martin Plumbing, 24/7 emergency service in Lyon". A human understands everything. A machine prefers to be told in its own format: that is the role of structured data, a small invisible JSON-LD block that declares "this is a local business, here is its name, phone, opening hours, service area". Google uses it to enrich your results, and AI engines use it to cite you without getting the facts wrong.
No need to mark up everything: five types cover most of a small business's needs. Which ones, with a complete example to adapt and the three mistakes that invalidate the whole block: the structured data that actually matters.
Step 5: plug in the dashboard
Google Search Console is the official, free tool that shows your website the way Google sees it: the queries that display you, the pages indexed or excluded, the crawl errors. Half of the businesses we audit never installed it. That is driving without a speedometer.
Setup takes ten minutes, and three reports are enough for a serious monthly check: the Search Console beginner's guide.
Where to start, concretely?
The order of the steps above is the order of treatment. One simple rule to arbitrate: an indexing problem cancels everything else, a speed problem only degrades it.
site:test and indexing blockers fixed, same day.- robots.txt review, AI crawlers included, within the week.
- Search Console installed and sitemap submitted, within the week too.
- Core Web Vitals measured then fixed, within the month.
- Structured data on the pages that matter, within the month.
And if you prefer measurement to guesswork: our free audit runs 160 checks on your website, covering most of this guide, and returns a score per category in 30 seconds. The full report adds the exact fix for every finding.
Romain Ben