Before the audit, make a list of your important pages and get access to Search Console. Tie every problem you find to a specific URL: that way you’ll know how many pages it affects and who needs to fix it. The list below will help you work through it in order.
Indexing and Search Console
An audit always starts with one question: does Google see the pages you want it to see, and does it see things that shouldn’t be in search? The main source for the answer is Google Search Console. If your website isn’t added yet, do that first: verify that you own the domain and submit your sitemap.
In Search Console’s indexing report, pay attention to these groups:
“Discovered, currently not indexed.” Google knows the page exists but hasn’t decided to crawl it yet. A large number usually points to weak internal linking or low quality.
“Crawled, currently not indexed.” Google visited the page and left it out of the index. The usual reason is thin or repetitive content.
Pages with a noindex tag. Check that no important page still has noindex, for example after moving the site over from a staging version.
404 and server errors. 5xx codes point to a hosting problem and should be fixed first.
At the same step, look at your robots.txt file. One wrong Disallow line can block a whole section, or the CSS and JavaScript files, so Google can no longer see the page the way a visitor does. Then use the URL Inspection tool on a few key pages to see how Google renders them and which canonical it chose.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Speed is a ranking factor, but it matters most for how people behave: on a slow website, visitors leave more often and fill in fewer forms. Google measures speed with three metrics known as Core Web Vitals.
| Metric | What it measures | Good |
|---|---|---|
| LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) | What it measuresHow quickly the largest element on the page appears | GoodUnder 2.5 seconds |
| INP (Interaction to Next Paint) | What it measuresHow quickly the page responds to taps, clicks and typing | GoodUnder 200 milliseconds |
| CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) | What it measuresHow much the content jumps around while it loads | GoodUnder 0.1 |
Check both sources: Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report, which uses data from real visitors, and PageSpeed Insights, which gives detailed recommendations for a specific page. The most common reasons websites fail this test are simple: heavy images without modern formats, too many plugins and scripts, chat widgets and tracking codes that slow the page down, and fonts that delay the text from appearing.
Fonts deserve a special mention. Loading several weights of a web font noticeably adds to the page’s size. Use only the weights you need, the WOFF2 format and font-display: swap, so the text shows even before the font has loaded. For more on this, see our guide Page Speed for Cleaning Company Websites.
Server, HTTPS and Security
HTTPS has long been the standard, but audits still often turn up problems with it. Check that your SSL certificate is valid and renews automatically, that every page and file loads over HTTPS, and that there’s no “mixed content”, where an image or script on a secure page comes from an insecure address. Browsers show such pages with a warning, which hurts visitors’ trust directly.
If your server is slow to respond, check your hosting, caching and whether you use a CDN. In Search Console’s crawl stats, look at server errors too: note how often they happen and when the response time goes up.
Canonicals, Duplicates and Redirects
Duplicate content is one of the most common and least noticed technical SEO problems. The same page can be reachable at several addresses: with and without www, over http and https, with and without a trailing slash, and with filter or UTM parameters. To Google these are different pages, and it decides for itself which one to treat as the main one.
Check that:
every variant (http, www, trailing slash) goes to one main address with a single redirect;
each page has a canonical tag pointing to its own correct address;
filter, sort and search pages don’t create thousands of indexable variants;
redirects are 301, not 302, when the change is permanent;
there are no redirect chains, where one address goes to a second and the second to a third;
internal links point straight to the final address, not to a redirect or a 404 page.
Redirects need special attention after a redesign or a domain change. If the old addresses don’t redirect correctly to the new ones, the website loses the authority it built up over the years, and visitors with old links end up on a 404 page.
Sitemap, Site Structure and Internal Links
An XML sitemap tells Google which pages matter to you. A good sitemap contains only indexable, canonical addresses that respond with a 200 code. Redirects, noindex pages or 404 addresses in it weaken the signal. Make sure the sitemap updates automatically when you publish a new page, that its address is listed in robots.txt, and that Search Console processes it successfully.
When you judge the structure, count how many clicks it takes to get from the home page to your important pages. Ideally your main services and service areas are no more than three clicks deep. Look for “orphan” pages that no link on your site points to: Google finds them with difficulty and gives them little weight. Check your URL structure here too: short, readable addresses like /deep-cleaning-austin always beat long ones full of codes and parameters.
Mobile Version and Structured Data
Google judges your website mainly by its mobile version. So if part of the content is hidden on mobile, the menu doesn’t work or the text is too small to read, that shows up directly in your rankings. Check that the mobile and desktop versions have the same main content, headings and metadata, that buttons are easy to tap with a thumb, and that pop-ups don’t cover the main content.
Structured data (schema.org) helps Google understand what a page is about, and in some cases adds rich results in search. The most useful types for a cleaning company’s website:
Organization and LocalBusiness with your company name, address or service area, phone number and hours;
Service for each cleaning service, with a description and the area you serve;
Article for blog posts, with the author and the date;
BreadcrumbList for the navigation trail;
FAQPage for blocks of frequently asked questions.
Test your structured data with Google’s Rich Results Test and Search Console’s enhancement reports. It’s important that the markup matches what’s visible on the page: if the schema shows one price and the page another, Google may ignore the markup altogether. Clear, structured data is useful for AI assistants too, which we cover in detail in What Is GEO, and How to Get Found in AI Search.
Hreflang: English and Spanish Versions
Many cleaning companies in the US serve both English- and Spanish-speaking customers, and some have their website in both languages. On such sites, hreflang tags tell Google which page is meant for which language and which pages are translations of each other. Wrong hreflang is the most common reason a Spanish-speaking customer sees the English page in search, or the other way around.
Check that:
each language version points to all the others and to itself;
the links go both ways: if the English page points to the Spanish one, the Spanish page points back to it;
the codes are correct: en and es (or en-us and es-us), not made-up ones like sp;
there’s an x-default version for visitors whose language the site doesn’t offer;
each language’s canonical points to its own language page, not to the English original;
not only the text is translated, but also the title, the description and the images’ alt text.
Partly translated pages are a separate problem: English buttons, menu items or footer text left on the Spanish version. Google treats such a page as mixed-language content, and visitors lose trust.
Common Problems on Cleaning Company Websites
A few problems come up again and again in technical audits of cleaning company websites. If your site runs on WordPress or a similar platform, you’ll probably recognize some of these:
Common problems
6 to check forSeveral H1s, or none at all. Themes and page builders often wrap the logo, the phone number or footer headings in H1 or H2 tags, which breaks the heading hierarchy.
Empty or repeated meta descriptions. Dozens of pages share the same title, often just the company name.
Unoptimized images. Photos of several megabytes each, with no alt text and file names like IMG_2041.jpg.
Indexed test or old versions. Dev subdomains or copies of an old website competing with the main site in search.
Translation plugin problems. Language versions without hreflang, or with a canonical that points every language to the English page.
Too many plugins. Dozens of active add-ons, some no longer used, each loading its own scripts on every page.
Most of these problems are neither expensive nor hard to fix, but together their effect can be significant. If the platform itself is what holds you back, it’s sometimes more sensible to build a new website with an SEO-first structure than to keep adding workarounds to the old one.
Next to each problem, note an example, how to fix it and the date you checked. That way the audit list also works as a record of the work done.
How Often to Run an Audit
A full technical audit is recommended at least once a year, and once a quarter for large, frequently updated websites. Beyond that, there are moments when an audit is essential, whatever the schedule:
before and after a redesign or a move to a new platform;
when you change your domain or URL structure;
when you add a new language version;
when organic traffic drops unexpectedly;
after a major Google algorithm update, if your rankings moved.
Between full audits, monthly monitoring is enough: a look at Search Console errors, the number of indexed pages and the Core Web Vitals report. It takes a few minutes, but it shows you a problem while it’s still small. If you’d like this done systematically, technical work is part of our SEO service for cleaning companies and of every monthly plan, which start at $699 a month. See the details in our pricing.
Start With a Free Audit
If you’d like to know which technical problems are holding your website back, fill in the form to get a free SEO audit. We’ll check indexing, speed, language versions and structure, and send you a list sorted by priority: what to fix first and what can wait.