Technical SEO is the part of SEO that most tradespeople never think about — and the part that can single-handedly prevent their website from ranking, no matter how good the content is. Think of it as the foundations of a house: invisible when done right, catastrophic when done wrong.

The Technical SEO Checklist for Trades Websites

Site Speed

  • Pages load in under 2.5 seconds on mobile (test at PageSpeed Insights)
  • All images are compressed (WebP format, under 150KB for most images)
  • Caching is enabled (WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache)
  • Hosting is on a fast server (avoid bargain shared hosting)
  • No render-blocking scripts delaying page load

Mobile Optimisation

  • Website passes Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
  • Text is readable without zooming (minimum 16px font size)
  • Buttons are large enough to tap (minimum 44px)
  • No horizontal scrolling required
  • Phone number is a clickable tel: link

Indexability

  • All important pages are indexed (check in Google Search Console)
  • No accidental “noindex” tags on pages you want to rank
  • XML sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console
  • Robots.txt is not blocking important pages
  • No broken links (404 errors) on important pages

HTTPS and Security

  • Website uses HTTPS (padlock in browser bar)
  • No mixed content warnings
  • SSL certificate is valid and not expired

Core Web Vitals

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): under 2.5 seconds
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): under 0.1 (page does not jump around as it loads)
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP): under 200ms
  • Check all three in Google Search Console under “Core Web Vitals”

Schema Markup

  • LocalBusiness schema on homepage (name, address, phone, hours)
  • Service schema on each service page
  • Review schema showing star ratings in search results
  • Breadcrumb schema for improved SERP appearance

Duplicate Content

  • No duplicate page titles
  • No duplicate meta descriptions
  • Canonical tags in place where needed
  • www and non-www versions both redirect to one version

How to Check Your Technical SEO Health

Use Google Search Console (free) for indexing and Core Web Vitals. Use Screaming Frog (free up to 500 pages) for technical issues. Use Google PageSpeed Insights for speed. Use Schema.org Validator for schema markup.

Redirects and Legacy URLs

Every site that has been rebuilt carries ghosts: old URLs from the previous version that still sit in Google’s index and still collect impressions. If they return 404, that authority and that traffic die on the doorstep. The fix is boring and valuable: list every old URL you can find (Search Console’s pages report and a crawl of your old sitemap both help), and 301 redirect each one to its closest modern equivalent, not just the homepage. Blanket homepage redirects leak relevance; a page about boiler repairs should land on your boiler page. We find forgotten legacy URLs on almost every audit we run, including our own site, and redirecting them is some of the cheapest SEO value available.

Bot Access and Firewalls

Security plugins and hosting firewalls sometimes get overenthusiastic and start serving 403 errors to crawlers. When that happens to an SEO tool’s bot it skews your reports; if it ever happens to Googlebot, your rankings can quietly fall off a cliff with no visible symptom on the site itself. Twice a year, and after any security plugin change: use Search Console’s URL inspection live test on a handful of important pages (that is Googlebot itself asking), and check your firewall’s blocked-traffic log for legitimate crawlers. If your host offers “bot fight” style settings, make sure verified search engine bots are excluded from the fight.

Internal Links and Orphan Pages

An orphan page is one that exists in your sitemap but is linked from nowhere on the site. Crawlers can technically find it, but it receives no internal authority and usually never ranks. Trade sites breed orphans through page builders: area pages and service pages get created, never added to a menu, and sit invisible for years. The check is simple: crawl your own site with any SEO spider, export the list of pages found, and compare it against your sitemap. Anything in the sitemap but not the crawl is an orphan. Fix it with navigation links, footer links and in-content links from related pages; a page needs at least a couple of internal links pointing at it to be taken seriously.

A Simple Monthly Technical Routine

Ten minutes a month keeps most of this healthy: open Search Console and check the pages report for new 404s or a drop in indexed pages, run one page through the URL inspection live test, click through your own site on your phone as if you were a customer, and glance at your speed in PageSpeed Insights after any plugin or theme change. Technical SEO is not a one-off project; it is a smoke alarm you test monthly.

Technical SEO issues are fixable — but they require someone who knows what they are doing. At Grwthhub, we audit and fix technical SEO as part of our standard service. Learn more or book a free audit.

Tools That Do the Checking for You

You do not need paid software for any of this. Search Console is free and is Google telling you directly what it can and cannot see. PageSpeed Insights is free for speed and Core Web Vitals. Any of the mainstream SEO spiders will crawl a small trade site on their free tier, which covers the orphan check and the redirect audit. The paid tools earn their keep on bigger sites and competitive research, but a trade site under a hundred pages can stay technically healthy on free tooling and the monthly routine above.

About the author

Jamie Laird is the founder of Grwthhub, a marketing agency for trade businesses in Leeds and Yorkshire. Before marketing he spent a decade on the trade side as a quantity surveyor, pricing and running jobs for builders and contractors, which is why the advice here leans practical rather than theoretical. Read more about Jamie and Grwthhub or get in touch.