Most small businesses jump straight to keywords and content. But if the technical foundation is broken, even great content struggles to rank. Here is the foundation we check before anything else.
Crawlability and indexing
Search engines can only rank what they can find and read. We confirm a valid robots.txt, a current XML sitemap, clean canonical tags, and that important pages return a 200 status with no accidental noindex. A surprising number of sites quietly block their own best pages.
Structured data
Schema markup helps search engines understand what your pages are. For a local business, Organization and LocalBusiness schema plus FAQ markup on service pages can earn richer search results and better local visibility — often with little competition.
Core Web Vitals
Page speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor. We measure Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and interaction latency on real pages, then fix the biggest offenders: oversized images, render-blocking scripts, and layout shifts.
Site structure and internal links
A flat, logical structure with clear internal links tells search engines which pages matter and how they relate. Service pages should link to each other and to relevant content, and every important page should be reachable within a couple of clicks from the homepage.
Why this order matters
Content and links amplify a healthy site. On a broken foundation, they underperform. Fix the foundation first, and every later investment in content and SEO works harder.
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