A founder's five-minute technical SEO checklist
No jargon, just the handful of technical issues that actually move rankings, checked in under five minutes.
By the markmetAI Team ·
Technical SEO gets treated like a specialist-only topic, but most of what actually moves rankings for a small site comes down to five checks anyone can run without tools or training.
1. Can Google actually find and index your pages?
Search site:yourdomain.com on Google. If your key pages don't show up, something is blocking indexing: a stray noindex tag, a robots.txt rule, or a missing sitemap. Google's own Page Indexing report in Search Console will confirm exactly which pages are excluded and why. This is the single most common reason a site "isn't ranking": it was never indexed in the first place.
2. Is there one canonical URL per page?
If the same content is reachable at multiple URLs (with and without a trailing slash, with and without "www"), search engines can split ranking signal between duplicates instead of consolidating it onto one page. A canonical tag on every page, pointing to the single preferred URL, fixes this.
3. Does every page have a unique title and meta description?
Duplicate or missing titles across pages confuse both search engines and the people scanning results. Each page needs a distinct, descriptive title under about 60 characters and a meta description that gives someone a reason to click.
4. How fast does the site load, especially on mobile?
Core Web Vitals (load speed, visual stability, interactivity) are a confirmed ranking factor, and mobile performance matters more than desktop since that's where most search traffic happens. Large unoptimized images are the most common, and easiest to fix, cause of a slow score.
5. Is there a sitemap, and does it match what's actually live?
An XML sitemap at /sitemap.xml, referenced from robots.txt, gives search engines a direct list of every URL worth indexing. A sitemap that's missing, stale, or listing pages that no longer exist wastes crawl attention and can slow down how fast new content gets discovered.
None of these require deep technical knowledge to check, and fixing them typically has more impact on rankings than any single piece of new content. They're also exactly the kind of thing worth re-checking after any redesign or platform migration, since that's when canonical tags and sitemaps most often break silently. Our SEO & AEO service runs this full check automatically and flags regressions before they cost you rankings.
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