Technical SEO for a local business comes down to six things: a site that loads fast, works well on a phone, can be found and read by crawlers, has no broken pages, runs on a secure connection, and shows exactly one version of each page. Clear those six and you are ahead of most local competitors without touching a line of code yourself.
You do not need to become a developer to get this right. You need to know what to check, why each item matters, and what to ask the person who runs your website. That is what this checklist is for. There is also a newer reason to care: the same technical problems that frustrate Google now also stop AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity from reading — and recommending — your business.
Why do AI engines care about your technical setup?
When someone asks an AI assistant for a good plumber, dentist, or accountant nearby, the engine behind that answer has usually crawled or fetched real web pages to decide who deserves a mention. Those fetchers are impatient. Pages that load slowly, block crawlers, or hide their content behind heavy scripts tend to get skipped rather than deciphered. So every item below pays off twice: once in traditional search rankings and once in AI-generated answers.
The six-point checklist
1. Speed: does your site load before people give up?
Run your homepage and one or two key pages through Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool. You do not need a perfect score; you need pages that feel quick on a normal phone connection. The usual culprits are oversized photos, a pile of plugins, and bargain hosting — all fixable without a redesign.
2. Mobile: does it actually work on a phone?
Most local searches happen on phones, often in the moment of need. Pull your site up on your own phone and try to do what a customer would do: find your number, tap to call, get directions, skim your services. If you have to pinch and zoom, or a popup swallows the screen, that is costing you customers no matter how good the site looks on a desktop.
3. Indexability: can search engines find your pages?
A page that is not indexed cannot rank, and it cannot be cited by an AI engine either. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and confirm your important pages appear. If key pages are missing, ask your web person whether anything is blocked in robots.txt, tagged "noindex," or orphaned with no links pointing to it. These are common leftovers from a site launch or redesign.
4. Broken pages: are you sending people to dead ends?
Broken links and 404 errors waste crawl attention and erode trust — for humans and machines alike. If you have retired old services or reorganized the site, the old URLs may still be linked from directories, reviews, and other websites. Each one should redirect to the closest living page rather than a generic error.
5. HTTPS: is the padlock there on every page?
A secure connection has been table stakes for years. Check that every version of your address — with and without "www," with and without "https" — lands on the same secure URL. If any browser shows a "not secure" warning anywhere on your site, treat it as a this-week fix, not a this-quarter fix.
6. Duplicate content: is there one version of each page?
Duplicates confuse machines about which page is the real one and split whatever authority you have earned across the copies. Common causes include a staging copy of the site left open to crawlers, printer-friendly versions, and the same service description pasted across ten location pages. Consolidate, redirect, or rewrite so each page has one clear job.
What should you ask your web person?
You can delegate the work; you should not delegate the questions. Ask these five:
- "What does PageSpeed Insights say about our top pages, and what are the two cheapest wins?"
- "Are any important pages blocked from indexing — and can you show me what Google has indexed?"
- "Do we have redirects in place for every URL we have retired?"
- "Does every version of our domain resolve to one secure address?"
- "Is any duplicate or staging content visible to crawlers?"
A competent web person can answer all five quickly and specifically. Vague answers are themselves an answer.
How often should you re-check?
Technical health decays quietly. A plugin update slows the site, a redesign drops the redirects, a new page ships with "noindex" accidentally left on — and nothing looks different to you. A quarterly pass through this checklist catches most of it. If you would rather not rely on memory, monitoring tools — Speak Local among them — watch these fundamentals continuously alongside your local rankings and flag regressions before they cost you a month of visibility.
None of this is glamorous. But technical SEO is the plumbing of your online presence: invisible when it works, expensive when it fails, and absolutely worth a scheduled inspection.
