We audit a lot of small business websites. The same handful of technical problems show up again and again — and every one of them caps the return on any content or link building you do afterwards.
1. No canonical tags
Without a self-referencing canonical, the same page is often reachable at several URLs: with and without a trailing slash, with and without www, with tracking parameters attached. Search engines then have to guess which one is authoritative, and they do not always guess the way you would like.
2. Images with no dimensions
An img tag without width and height attributes causes layout shift while the page loads. That hurts Cumulative Layout Shift directly, and it is genuinely irritating to use on a slow connection.
3. Missing or duplicated meta descriptions
A duplicated meta description is a signal that nobody is minding the site. It will not tank your rankings on its own, but it costs click-through rate on every impression.
4. No XML sitemap, or one that is out of date
A stale sitemap listing deleted pages wastes crawl budget and undermines trust in the file. It should regenerate automatically when content changes.
5. Redirect chains from an old site
A redesign that redirects old URLs to a hub page rather than the matching new page throws away every link and every ranking those pages had earned. Map them one to one.
Where to start
Run the site through a crawler and check these five first. They are inexpensive to fix and they raise the ceiling on everything you do afterwards.
Need a hand with this?
We do this work for businesses every day. Tell us what you are dealing with and we will give you a straight answer.
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