Most business websites in India do not lose rankings because of content. They lose them because a crawler cannot reach half the pages, the mobile layout shifts while it loads, or six near-identical service pages compete with each other for the same keyword. Technical SEO is the part nobody sees and everybody feels.
This is the checklist our team works through before we touch copy or backlinks. It is the same list we run on every business website we design and on audits of sites built elsewhere.
1. Make sure Google can actually crawl the site
Start with the plumbing. If this layer is broken, everything downstream is wasted effort.
- robots.txt — confirm it is not blocking
/css/,/js/or image folders. Google renders pages like a browser; blocking assets makes your site look broken to the crawler. - XML sitemap — it should list every page you want indexed and nothing you do not. Ours is generated from the database so it never goes stale; you can see the human version on our sitemap page.
- Canonical tags — every page needs a self-referencing canonical. This is the single cheapest fix for duplicate-content problems caused by query strings, trailing slashes and
wwwversus non-www. - HTTPS everywhere — one HTTP asset on an HTTPS page triggers mixed-content warnings and kills trust signals.
- 404 handling — a real 404 status code, not a 200 response with an "oops" message. Soft 404s waste crawl budget.
2. Fix URL structure before you have backlinks
URLs are cheap to change on day one and expensive to change in year three. Use short, readable, keyword-bearing paths and keep them stable.
Query-string filters like
?category=erpare invisible to most link equity. Turn them into real paths —/blog/category/enterprise-software— and 301 the old form.
When we moved our own blog filters from query strings to paths, we kept 301 redirects on the old URLs so existing links and anything already indexed continued to work. Never delete an indexed URL; redirect it.
3. Core Web Vitals are a ranking input, not a vanity metric
Google's three thresholds are public and specific:
| Metric | What it measures | Good |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | Largest Contentful Paint — when the main content appears | 2.5 s or less |
| INP | Interaction to Next Paint — responsiveness to taps and clicks | 200 ms or less |
| CLS | Cumulative Layout Shift — how much the page jumps around | 0.1 or less |
These are measured on real visitors, on real phones, on real Indian mobile networks — not on your office fibre connection. We wrote up the engineering side of hitting those numbers in Core Web Vitals for ASP.NET Core Sites, and the server-side techniques in Brotli, HTML minification and cache headers.
The three fixes with the best return
- Set width and height on every image. Almost all CLS problems are images and ads reserving no space.
- Compress and cache aggressively. Brotli on text responses, a long
Cache-Controlon versioned assets. - Stop loading fonts and scripts you do not use. Every blocking third-party script is added to your LCP.
4. Structured data, done properly
Schema markup will not rank you on its own, but it is how you win the visual real estate — star ratings, FAQ accordions, breadcrumbs, job listings. For a services business, Organization, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage cover most of the opportunity. We go through the implementation detail in our schema markup guide.
5. Internal linking is the lever nobody pulls
Internal links tell Google which of your pages matter and what they are about. Most business sites have a navigation menu and nothing else, which means every page below the fold is one link deep from a menu and zero links deep from any content.
- Link from blog posts to the service page that the post supports — an article on ERP selection should link to ERP development.
- Link between related posts so a reader (and a crawler) can move sideways through a topic.
- Use descriptive anchor text. "Click here" tells a search engine nothing; "custom CRM development" tells it everything.
- Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage.
6. The India-specific checks
Some things matter more here than in a US-focused checklist:
- Test on mid-range Android over 4G, not an iPhone over Wi-Fi. That is the median Indian visitor.
- Serve images as WebP or AVIF. On metered data, page weight is a conversion issue, not just a speed issue.
- Put a real NAP — name, address, phone — in the footer and in
LocalBusinessschema, matched exactly to your Google Business Profile. - Mobile-first everything. Google indexes the mobile version. If content is hidden on mobile, treat it as content you do not have.
The short version
| Check | Fix if broken |
|---|---|
| robots.txt blocks assets | Allow CSS, JS and images |
| No XML sitemap, or a stale one | Generate it from your data |
| Missing canonicals | Self-referencing canonical on every page |
| LCP above 2.5 s | Compress, cache, drop blocking scripts |
| CLS above 0.1 | Dimensions on images and embeds |
| No structured data | Organization, Breadcrumb, FAQ |
| Orphan pages | Internal links with real anchor text |
If you would rather not run this list yourself, this is exactly what our SEO optimization service covers, and it is built into every website design and WordPress engagement. Where organic alone is too slow, we pair it with PPC advertising. See pricing or talk to us about an audit of your current site.