Technical SEO for a small site comes down to two free tools and one habit. Screaming Frog surfaces the errors you cannot see by clicking around; PageSpeed Insights measures speed from where your readers actually are. Then a four-slot weekly rhythm keeps it that way — with an honest look at what free tools still cannot do.

SEOIndie DevTechnical

The page that took nine seconds on a phone

The story page I made for my daughter used to load like a slideshow. Four illustrations, each exported at full resolution, and on a mid-range Android — the kind most of our readers actually hold — the first image took almost seven seconds to appear.

That mattered more than any keyword. LittleStory exists so a parent can point a phone at one photo, say a single sentence, and get an illustrated bedtime story read back in their own recorded voice. None of it works if the child has lost interest before the first picture arrives.

Crawl your own site like a stranger would

Screaming Frog's free tier caps a crawl at 500 URLs, which sounds like a limitation until you accept you should never start with the whole site. Point it at the blog directory only and you get a report in ten minutes.

Then filter down to four things: 404s, duplicate titles, missing H1s and redirect chains. On my first run, two story pages carried the same title and a third had no H1 at all — problems I would never have found by clicking around the site myself.

Measure speed where your readers are

PageSpeed Insights reports LCP, INP and CLS separately for mobile and desktop, and it names the specific asset holding the page back. The part worth reading is the field data from real visitors, not the lab score.

Test from your target market rather than your own desk. A page that scored 95 for me scored 61 for readers an ocean away. Compressing the illustrations and deferring one font cut the first image from 6.8 seconds to under two.

A weekly rhythm, and an honest ceiling

Four short sittings cover most of it. Monday, pick three to five topics. Tuesday, write and speed-test the page you just finished. Thursday, crawl for technical errors. Sunday, read Search Console and check backlinks in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Free tools do have ceilings worth naming: no competitor keywords or traffic, three searches a day on most keyword tools, and nothing that warns you when a page breaks — you have to remember to look. The point was never to replace a paid suite, but to fix what I could already see before paying for what I could not. No keyword report would have told me a picture was making my daughter wait seven seconds.

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