You launch a beautiful new site. The copy is sharp, the design is on brand, and you tell your team to start sharing the link. Three weeks later, Google Search Console shows twelve indexed pages out of forty, your service pages are missing from search, and nobody knows why.
That is a technical SEO problem, not a content problem. Technical SEO is the plumbing: crawlability, indexation, metadata, structured data, and performance. Boring until it breaks. Here is what to check before and right after launch.
Can search engines find your pages?
If Googlebot cannot reach a URL, it cannot rank. These are the blockers we see most on new builds:
- robots.txt allows important paths and points to your XML sitemap. Verify at
yoursite.com/robots.txt. - XML sitemap lists canonical URLs for home, services, blog posts, and key landing pages. Submit it in Google Search Console.
- No accidental noindex tags on pages you want in search results. Staging noindex left on production is a classic launch mistake.
- 404 pages marked noindex so soft errors do not pollute the index.
- Clean redirects from old URLs if you migrated from a previous site (301, not chains of 302s).
How to verify: Google Search Console → Pages report. Look for "Crawled, currently not indexed" and "Discovered, currently not indexed." Fix blockers before writing more content.
Can search engines understand your pages?
Crawlable is step one. Step two is making each page's topic obvious to machines and humans.
- Unique title and meta description per page. No duplicate "Home | My Business" on every URL.
- One H1 with a logical heading hierarchy (H2, H3). Do not skip levels.
- Self-referencing canonical URLs on every indexable page, especially if you use URL parameters or trailing slashes inconsistently.
- Descriptive alt text on images that carry meaning (not "image1.jpg" on every photo).
How to verify: View source on your top five pages. Check title, canonical, and H1. Run a crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb (free tier works for small sites) to catch duplicates.
Structured data for service businesses
Schema markup helps search engines interpret your content and can unlock rich results. For a typical GTA service business site, prioritize:
- Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage (name, URL, logo, area served).
- Service on each service page (name, description, provider).
- FAQPage where you have genuine FAQ sections (not fake questions for markup alone).
- Article on blog posts (headline, datePublished, author).
How to verify: Google Rich Results Test or Schema Markup Validator. Fix errors before warnings. Invalid schema is worse than none.
Are pages fast and mobile-ready?
Google uses mobile-first indexing. Slow or broken mobile experiences hurt rankings and conversions.
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): under 2.5 seconds. Usually fixed by optimizing hero images and server response time.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): under 200ms. Heavy JavaScript and third-party widgets are common culprits.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): under 0.1. Set width/height on images and reserve space for ads or embeds.
How to verify: PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and top service page template. Fix the template first; one fix scales to every page using it.
Week 1 priority order for new sites
If you can only do five things in the first week after launch, do these in order:
- Confirm noindex is removed from production pages.
- Submit sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Set unique titles and meta descriptions on home, services, contact, and top landing pages.
- Add Organization/LocalBusiness and Service schema on the relevant templates.
- Run PageSpeed Insights on mobile and fix the largest LCP issue (usually one image).
How often should I update my sitemap?
Most modern frameworks regenerate the sitemap on deploy. If you add pages manually, update the sitemap the same day and resubmit in Search Console. You do not need to ping Google daily.
Should 404 pages be noindex?
Yes. A helpful 404 page for users should still carry a noindex meta tag so Google does not treat soft 404s as real content.
When should I hire help vs DIY?
DIY is fine for sitemap submission, title tags, and basic Search Console monitoring. Hire help when indexation is broken and you cannot find why, you migrated a site with hundreds of URLs, or Core Web Vitals fail on every template and your builder does not know why.
Does technical SEO replace content and links?
No. Technical SEO gets you into the race. Content matches search intent. Links and authority help you win competitive queries. All three matter, but technical issues block everything else until fixed.
Every GetWebMoose build ships with technical SEO foundations: sitemaps, metadata, structured data, and a performance pass. For existing sites that skipped this step, our SEO service starts with an audit of indexation, speed, and on-page structure.