Great content can still go nowhere if Google cannot crawl, read, or trust your site. This is the unglamorous plumbing that lets everything else rank — title tags, sitemaps, crawl errors, and speed — walked through in plain English, no developer required for most of it.

Before you start

  • Admin access — Login to your CMS (WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify) and the ability to verify ownership of the domain.
  • A few free tools — Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. An SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math helps if you are on WordPress.
  • An afternoon — The audit takes an hour; the fixes a little longer. Verification in Search Console can take a day or two to settle.

1. Confirm Google can actually index you

Open Google and search site:yourdomain.com. If few or no pages show up, something is blocking you. Check that your robots.txt is not disallowing the whole site and that no important pages carry a "noindex" tag — a single leftover setting from launch can hide everything.

2. Set up Google Search Console

Verify your domain in Search Console (the free, official source of truth). Submit your site and watch the Pages report — it tells you exactly which URLs are indexed, which are excluded, and why. Everything else in this guide is easier once this is connected.

3. Submit a clean XML sitemap

A sitemap is the list of pages you want found. Yoast or Rank Math generates one automatically at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. Submit that URL in Search Console, then make sure it only lists real, live pages — no drafts, redirects, or 404s.

4. Write a unique title and description per page

Every page needs its own title tag (under ~60 characters) and meta description (under ~155). Duplicates confuse Google and waste your best real estate in search results. Lead with the keyword, keep it human, and never leave two pages sharing the same title.

5. Fix broken links and crawl errors

Work through the "Not found (404)" and "Server error (5xx)" lists in Search Console. Redirect dead URLs that had value to the closest live page with a 301, and fix internal links pointing to pages that no longer exist. Broken links waste crawl budget and frustrate visitors.

6. Settle on one canonical version of each URL

Pick http vs https and www vs non-www, then redirect every other version to it so you are not competing with yourself. Add canonical tags so Google knows the preferred URL when the same content is reachable more than one way (filters, tracking parameters, print views).

7. Pass Core Web Vitals on mobile

Run your homepage and a key page through PageSpeed Insights. Aim to clear the "Good" thresholds for largest contentful paint, layout shift, and responsiveness — usually by compressing images, lazy-loading below the fold, and trimming heavy scripts. Most local sites win here just by fixing oversized images.