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Small Business SEO Audit Checklist

The SEO + AI search audit every small business website should run. No agency jargon, no enterprise-only tools, no items that need a developer. Just the SEO foundations, Core Web Vitals, on-page content, and AI search readiness signals (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google's AI Overview) that move the needle when you're the marketing team and the technical team.

Free, no email required · One-page printable PDF · Works on WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, or anything else

SEO Foundations

4 items

  1. Set a unique title tag and meta description on every page

    50–60 characters for the title, 140–160 for the description. Lead with the keyword you want the page to rank for. Default templates that repeat across pages are the single most common SEO miss on small business sites.

  2. Use one H1 and a logical heading hierarchy

    Exactly one H1 per page (the main topic). H2 for sections, H3 for sub-sections. Don't skip levels. Search engines and AI engines both use heading structure to summarise what the page is about.

  3. Add descriptive alt text to every meaningful image

    Describe what's in the image in plain English ("Navy linen apron, front view" not "IMG_2843"). Decorative images can use alt="". Helps Google Image Search, screen-reader users, and AI engines that build product knowledge from image captions.

  4. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console

    Most platforms publish one automatically at /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml. Verify it loads in a browser, then add it in Search Console → Sitemaps. Re-submit when you launch a major new section.

Performance & Core Web Vitals

4 items

  1. Run PageSpeed Insights and aim for green Core Web Vitals on mobile

    pagespeed.web.dev — paste your homepage. Focus on the mobile score. LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1. Mobile speed is the lever with the biggest combined SEO + conversion impact.

  2. Compress hero and above-the-fold images before uploading

    Under 500KB for hero shots, under 250KB for product or gallery images. Use Squoosh, ShortPixel, or your platform's built-in compressor. CDNs deliver images fast — they don't shrink your source files.

  3. Serve every page over HTTPS with HTTP → HTTPS redirect

    If yoursite.com (no s) doesn't auto-redirect to https://yoursite.com, you have duplicate URLs splitting your SEO authority. Most platforms enable this in one toggle. Ranking signal + trust signal in one fix.

  4. Fix broken internal links and remove (or 301-redirect) dead pages

    Use Google Search Console → Pages report or a free crawler like Screaming Frog. Broken internal links waste crawl budget and signal a poorly maintained site. Redirect deleted pages to the closest live equivalent — never leave them as 404s when external links still point at them.

On-Page Content

3 items

  1. One topic and one clear keyword target per page

    If a page is trying to rank for five different things, it ranks for none of them. Pick the one search query the page is the best answer to, and write the page around that. Use related variations naturally — never keyword-stuff.

  2. Internal links from your most-visited pages to your most-important pages

    Your homepage and top blog posts are your authority hubs. Link from them — in body copy, not just the nav — to the conversion pages you want ranking. This is the single most under-used SEO lever on SMB sites.

  3. Write distinctive copy on every page — no duplicates across pages

    Identical product descriptions across 50 product pages, or the same boilerplate "About us" paragraph in every footer, look like duplicate content to Google. Each page needs at least a few unique sentences that describe what makes it different.

AI Search Visibility (Bonus)

4 items

  1. Publish Organization (or LocalBusiness) schema sitewide

    Foundational entity signal — without it, AI engines have no authoritative source for your business name, logo, founder, and social profiles. Use Google's Rich Results Test to confirm it validates. Most CMSes have a plugin or built-in field for this.

  2. Add Article or HowTo schema on guide and how-to pages

    These are the schema types AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, AI Overview) most often cite directly. If you have a step-by-step guide, mark it up — it dramatically improves your odds of being quoted in an AI answer.

  3. Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt

    Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt. Confirm there's no Disallow rule naming GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, or CCBot. If those names don't appear at all, the defaults already allow them. Block them and AI engines can't see (or cite) you.

  4. Sanity-check that your hero copy isn't JavaScript-only

    Right-click your homepage → View Page Source → Ctrl+F your H1 headline. If it's there, AI crawlers can read it. If you only see <div id="root"></div>, your page is JavaScript-rendered and most AI engines can't see your content at all.

Want to take this offline?

Download the same checklist as a one-page printable PDF. Hand it to your developer, your marketing manager, or print it and tick items off as you go.

Want platform-specific guidance?

Each platform has its own controls and ceilings. We publish dedicated checklists with the exact menu paths and plugin names for the most common ones.

WordPress checklist
SEO + AI search, one page
Shopify checklist
SEO + AI search, one page
Wix checklist
SEO + AI search, one page

Want to know what to fix first on your site?

This checklist is the menu. A free Stackra audit is the diagnosis — it scans your live pages and gives you a prioritised, fix-first action plan based on what's actually broken right now. Use the two together.

Free to sign up · Results in ~3 minutes