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Technical SEO results showing traffic growth for a small business website

Technical SEO vs. Pretty Design: What Actually Gets You Found

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I recently audited a client’s website and found 839 flagged technical SEO issues on a single 200-page site — broken schema markup, missing alt text, a corrupted sitemap, zero connection to Google Search Console. The site looked fine to any visitor. Google had almost no idea it existed.

This is the gap most small business owners never see: design is what customers notice, but technical SEO for small business websites is what actually determines whether customers find you in the first place.

What Technical SEO Actually Covers

Technical SEO isn’t about keywords or blog posts — it’s the underlying plumbing that lets Google properly read and rank your site. That includes:

  • Making sure Google can properly crawl and index every page
  • Structured data (schema) that helps Google understand what each page is about
  • A clean, accurate sitemap — not a stale one submitted years ago and never updated
  • Page speed and Core Web Vitals
  • Proper title tags and meta descriptions on every page, not just the homepage

You can check the health of your own site’s crawlability for free using Google Search Console — if you’ve never connected your site to it, that’s usually the first sign technical SEO has been overlooked.

A Real Example

After fixing these issues on one client’s site — Fornaro Legal, a South Florida law firm — organic clicks grew 715% and impressions grew over 1,250% year over year. Several keywords now rank on page one of Google, including a generic, highly competitive term like “contract lawyer.” You can see the full breakdown, including the real Search Console data, in the Fornaro Legal case study.

That result didn’t come from a redesign. It came from the same site, technically fixed.

Why This Matters More Than a Redesign

A new coat of paint feels productive, but if the underlying technical SEO is broken, a redesign just means a prettier site that’s still invisible in search. Technical SEO for small business owners is rarely glamorous work, but it’s almost always the highest-leverage fix available — often more impactful than anything visual.

If your website looks good but you’re not confident anyone is actually finding it through search, technical SEO is almost always the real problem to check first.

Common website mistakes that cost small businesses customers

5 Website Mistakes That Are Costing Small Businesses Customers

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If you run a small business, chances are you think your website is “fine.” But most small business website mistakes aren’t things owners notice on their own — they’re the kind of problems that quietly cost you customers before you ever get a phone call or an email. After auditing sites across legal, financial, food service, and retail clients, the same handful of mistakes show up again and again. Here are the five most common, and what to do instead.

1. No Clear Next Step

A visitor lands on your homepage and has to hunt for how to actually contact you or book something. Every page should have one obvious action — call, book, buy — not five competing options fighting for attention. If a first-time visitor can’t tell what you want them to do within five seconds, you’ve already lost them.

2. Slow Load Times

If your site takes more than a couple of seconds to load, you’re losing visitors before they see anything at all. Oversized, unoptimized images are the most common culprit, and usually the easiest fix. You can check your own site’s speed for free using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

3. Not Mobile-Friendly

Over half of all web traffic today is mobile. A site that only looks good on desktop is turning away more than half your potential customers before they even get to read what you offer.

4. Missing or Generic Meta Descriptions

That’s the snippet of text under your link in Google search results. If it’s blank, Google picks random text from your page to display instead — often the worst possible sentence to lead with. This is one of the most common small business website mistakes I see, and one of the fastest to fix.

5. No Way to Track What’s Working

Without basic analytics connected to your site, you’re making decisions blind. You can’t fix what you can’t measure, and you won’t know whether the traffic you’re getting is actually turning into customers.

The Real Problem Behind These Mistakes

These aren’t design problems — they’re business problems wearing a design disguise. A pretty site that gets these five things wrong will still lose you customers. I recently walked through this exact process on my own site, fixing similar issues from scratch — you can see the full breakdown in my self-audit case study.

If you’re not sure whether your own site is making any of these small business website mistakes, a quick outside review is usually the fastest way to find out.