Technical checks before anything else

Search Console

Google Search Console is free and is the only place Google tells you directly what it sees of your site: which pages are indexed, which have errors, which queries the site appears for. Verify ownership, by DNS record if you can, by HTML file or tag if not. The baseline chapter needs its performance report; every later chapter uses its indexing reports.

Sitemap and robots

A sitemap is a file listing the pages you want indexed. Most website platforms generate one; find its address and submit it in Search Console. The robots file tells crawlers what not to fetch; check it is not blocking the whole site, the images, or the stylesheets, which happens more often than it should after a site is built with a “discourage search engines” setting left on. Google's documentation on both is linked below.

Indexing

Search Console's indexing report lists pages it found and whether it indexed them. Read the reasons for pages not indexed. Some are right: thank-you pages, tag archives, duplicates. Some are wrong: a service page marked no-index by mistake, or a page Google judged duplicate because two addresses serve it. Fix the wrong ones. Make sure each page that should exist has one address and the others redirect to it.

Speed and mobile

Test the homepage and one service page in PageSpeed Insights, on mobile. Google indexes the mobile version of a site and uses page-experience signals in ranking; its Core Web Vitals documentation, linked below, defines the thresholds. Then open the site on an actual phone: does the text fit, do the buttons work, is the phone number tappable, does the map load. Large images, unused scripts and slow hosting are the usual causes of poor scores, and each is fixable without rebuilding the site.

HTTPS and the basics

The site must be served over HTTPS, with the HTTP version redirecting. The domain with and without www must resolve to one of them. Error pages must return the right status. Broken links, found with any crawler tool, should be fixed or redirected. None of this is exotic; all of it is the kind of thing a business finds has been wrong for two years.

Illustrative example. A florist's site has been live for three years without Search Console. Verification shows the sitemap was never submitted, the robots file blocks the images folder, and the mobile score is poor because the homepage carries a video that autoplays. Three fixes, one afternoon. That describes the checks, not an outcome.

Output

Search Console verified with a submitted sitemap, no blocking errors, mobile rendering confirmed on a real phone, and a written list of the technical items that remain, prioritised. Only now does it make sense to write the pages.