Technical SEO sounds like a walled garden you need a specialist to enter. Some of it genuinely is. But a surprising amount of it is checkable by anyone with a phone, a browser, and twenty spare minutes. And it is worth checking, because these are the things an agency should have sorted before it ever talked to you about content or backlinks.
Here is a self-audit you can run today. None of it requires code. If something here is broken, you have found a real problem, and a fair question to put to whoever looks after your site.
Is your site actually in Google?
Everything else is pointless if Google has not indexed your pages. There is a fast way to check. Go to Google and type:
site:yourdomain.co.uk
Swap in your real domain. This asks Google to show only pages it has stored from your site. Look at the number of results and skim the list. Two things to watch for.
If it returns nothing at all, that is serious. Google either cannot find your site or has been told not to index it, and you are invisible in search. If it returns far fewer pages than your site actually has, some of your content is not making it in. Either way, that is a conversation to have quickly.
Does it load fast on a phone?
Most of your visitors, and most local searchers, are on mobile. Google judges your site on its mobile version, not the desktop one. So test the way people actually use it.
Open your homepage and your main service page on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. Count in your head. If the main content is not usable within about three seconds, it is too slow, and slow pages lose both rankings and enquiries before anyone reads a word.
For a second opinion, run the page through Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool. Do not chase a perfect score. What you want is the "mobile" tab out of the red, and the largest content on the page appearing quickly. A report that is a wall of red is a fixable technical job, not something to shrug at.
Do your key pages have sensible titles?
The page title is the clickable blue line Google shows in results, and it is one of the oldest ranking signals there is. It should say what the page is, in plain words a customer would use.
Check it in one second. Open a page in your browser and read the text on the tab at the top, or hover over it. Ask:
- Does it describe this specific page, or does every page just say your business name?
- Does it include what you actually do and, if you are local, where? "Bookkeeping Services in Norwich" beats "Home | Welcome".
- Is it unique to that page, or copied across the whole site?
Duplicate or empty titles are common and genuinely hold sites back. They are also a quick fix.
Is there one clear page per service?
This one catches a lot of businesses. If you offer five services, you should have a real, dedicated page for each, and each should be the obvious answer to someone searching for that single thing.
The failure I see most often is everything crammed onto one "Services" page, or the same service described three different ways across three thin pages that compete with each other. Google cannot tell which to rank, so it often ranks none of them well.
Walk your own site as a customer looking for one specific service. Can you reach a page that is only about that, with a clear title and a way to get in touch? If you land on a paragraph buried in a list, that service is under-served.
Does the site work without JavaScript?
This is the most technical check, and the most revealing. Search engines and AI crawlers can struggle with content that only appears after JavaScript runs. If your text, menu, and links are not in the raw page, they may not be seen or indexed.
Test it without any tools. In Chrome, right-click your homepage and choose "View page source". This shows the raw HTML the server sends, before scripts run. Use your browser's find function to search that source for a sentence you can see on the live page. If the words are there, good. If your main content is missing from the source and only the scripts are present, your site may be leaning too hard on JavaScript for crawlers, and that is worth raising.
What this really tells you
Run all five checks and you have done something useful. You have not become an SEO, but you now know whether the foundations are sound. Every item here is basic hygiene. If your site is not indexed, is slow on mobile, has junk titles, hides its services, or vanishes without JavaScript, those are things a competent agency should have fixed on day one.
If you would rather someone ran the full version and handed you a plain-English list of what is wrong and why, that is exactly what a technical SEO audit is for. But you are well within your rights to check the basics first.