A technical SEO checklist for a Christchurch business website should cover: mobile-friendliness, page speed and Core Web Vitals, a clean and submitted sitemap, correct canonical tags, no accidental noindex tags, HTTPS throughout, and valid structured data. These issues are invisible during normal browsing but can quietly cap rankings regardless of content quality.
A technical SEO check comes down to seven things: your site works well on a phone, loads quickly, has a clean sitemap, uses correct canonical tags, is not accidentally blocked from search, runs on HTTPS, and has valid structured data. You can test every one for free with Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test and your browser's view-source option.
Before you start, set up Search Console if you have not. Google's Search Console help walks through verifying your site. Most of the checks below use it.
1. Mobile-friendliness
Google indexes the mobile version of your pages, so the phone view is the one that counts. Open your site on your own phone, not a narrowed desktop window. Work through a real customer journey: find a service page, tap your phone number, submit the contact form.
A problem looks like text you have to pinch to read, tap targets sitting too close together, content wider than the screen, or a popup you cannot close. The fix is almost always in the theme or template settings, rather than anything that needs a rebuild. Our list of common SEO mistakes on Christchurch sites has the usual culprits.
2. Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Run your homepage and your top service page through PageSpeed Insights, using the mobile tab. Google documents three targets: Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 seconds or under, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or under, and Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or under. The report lists specific opportunities, usually led by oversized images.
Say a Hornby electrician's homepage loads a 4MB hero photo. Resizing it before upload is a ten-minute job that costs nothing. For the full diagnosis process, read our guide to website speed and SEO.
3. A clean, submitted sitemap
A sitemap is a file, usually at yoursite.co.nz/sitemap.xml, listing the pages you want found. Open it in your browser. It should list live pages only, with no redirected, deleted or test URLs. In Search Console, go to Sitemaps, enter the address and submit it. A status of Success means Google could read it.
A sitemap helps discovery, but it does not guarantee a page will be indexed or rank. Check the sitemap against what you actually want people to find. Say a Rolleston builder finds an old "test-page" and three duplicate service addresses in the list; removing them takes a minute and gives Google a tidier picture of the site.
4. Correct canonical tags
A canonical tag tells Google which address is the main version of a page when the same content is reachable several ways, such as with and without www, or with tracking parameters on the end. View the page source (Ctrl+U) and search for "canonical". The address it names should be the page's own clean URL.
To see what Google decided, paste the page into Search Console's URL Inspection tool and compare the user-declared canonical with the Google-selected one. If they differ, Google disagrees with you, and it is worth finding out why.
5. No accidental noindex tags
A noindex instruction tells Google to keep a page out of search results, and nothing about the page looks different when you browse it. It is usually a leftover from a staging site or a WordPress setting called "Discourage search engines from indexing this site", found under Settings and then Reading.
To check, view the source and search for "noindex". In Search Console, URL Inspection shows whether indexing is allowed, and the Page indexing report lists pages excluded and why. If key pages are missing from Google, this is the first place to look, along with the other reasons a business is invisible.
6. HTTPS throughout
Your address should start with https and show a padlock on every page. Try the http version of your address; it should redirect to https automatically. Mixed content, such as an image still loading over http, can trigger browser warnings. Right-click, choose Inspect, and look at the Console tab for mixed-content messages. Google has described HTTPS as a light ranking signal, but the larger cost of getting it wrong is lost visitor trust.
7. Valid structured data
Paste your homepage and a service page into the Rich Results Test. It shows the structured data found and flags errors. If it finds nothing, you have none to fix. Our schema markup guide explains which types a local business should use.
Skipping the rarely checked items is how problems sit unnoticed for months, so keep a simple tick list with the date of each check.
Make it routine
Work through the list every few months, and again after any redesign, hosting move or new page template. Take a note of what you find each time. If rankings have already fallen, recovering from a ranking drop shows how to work out whether a technical fault is the cause.
If you would rather hand the list to someone who does this daily, our SEO audits cover every item here and explain each finding in plain English. Or send your site through for a free SEO review and we will flag the obvious problems first.
