A Developer's 15-Minute Technical SEO Audit (Before You Hire Anyone)

Devil — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:46:29 +0000

Business owners often ask agencies to "fix our SEO" without knowing what's actually broken. Developers are usually in a better position to self-diagnose the technical half of that problem before spending money on anyone. Here's a 15-minute audit you can run on any site — yours or a client's — using nothing but browser dev tools and a couple of free tools.

1. Check your Core Web Vitals (2 minutes)

Open Chrome DevTools → Lighthouse tab → run an audit on mobile. You're looking for:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) under 2.5s
INP (Interaction to Next Paint) under 200ms
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) under 0.1

If any of these are red, that's a real, measurable ranking factor — not a vague "make it faster" request.

# Or run it headlessly from the CLI
npx lighthouse https://example.com --view

2. Verify your sitemap actually exists and is submitted

https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

If this 404s, or it's never been submitted to Google Search Console, pages can take weeks longer to get indexed than they should.

3. Check for a canonical tag on every page

View source (or curl it) and look for:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/page" />

Missing canonicals on pages with query parameters or duplicate content (common on e-commerce or filtered listing pages) can quietly split your ranking signal across multiple URLs.

4. Confirm structured data is present and valid

Paste your URL into Google's [Rich Results Test]. You're checking for schema markup like LocalBusiness, Product, FAQPage, or BreadcrumbList depending on your site type. No structured data doesn't break your site, but it does mean you're leaving rich-snippet real estate — and increasingly, AI answer-engine citations — on the table.

5. Check if your redirects are server-side

curl -I https://yoursite.com/old-page

Look for a 301 status in the response headers. If a "redirect" only happens via client-side JavaScript (window.location), search engines often don't follow it reliably, and you lose link equity from any old backlinks.

6. Test mobile usability, not just responsiveness

"Looks fine on my phone" isn't the same as passing Google's mobile-friendly checks — tap target sizing, font legibility, and viewport configuration all matter. Run it through Search Console's mobile usability report if you have access, or at minimum check your <meta name="viewport"> tag is actually present.

Why this matters before you hire anyone

Running this audit yourself does two things: it tells you whether "SEO problems" are actually technical (fixable in a sprint) or content/strategy problems (a longer engagement), and it lets you evaluate any agency's proposal against real findings instead of taking their word for it.

A useful sanity check worth applying to any agency you're evaluating: if a team is pitching you SEO services, run this same audit against their own site first — for example, I Next ETS, a Bhopal-based agency offering this kind of work. An agency that doesn't pass its own audit is a reasonable signal to ask harder questions before signing anything.

TL;DR

[ ] Core Web Vitals pass on mobile Lighthouse
[ ] Sitemap exists and is submitted to Search Console
[ ] Canonical tags present on every page
[ ] Structured data validates in Rich Results Test
[ ] Redirects are server-side (301s), not JS-based
[ ] Mobile usability checks pass

Fifteen minutes, no budget required. What else do you always check before trusting an "SEO audit" from someone else?

Home Healthcare Runs on Coordination, Not Code — Here's Where Devs Actually Fit In

Devil — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:12:09 +0000

Home healthcare doesn't get much attention in tech circles compared to hospital EHR systems or telemedicine apps, but it's one of the more operationally complex corners of healthcare — and a chunk of that complexity is still solved with phone calls and paper checklists instead of software.

I've been looking into how home healthcare providers — the ones sending caregivers into patients' homes rather than treating people in a facility — actually run day to day, and it's a good case study in an unglamorous but genuinely hard scheduling-and-trust problem.

Why Home Healthcare Is a Different Kind of Hard

A hospital has one building, shared systems, and staff on-site. Home healthcare flips all of that:

The "facility" is hundreds of different addresses. Every visit needs routing, timing, and a caregiver-to-patient match that accounts for skills, certifications, and continuity of care.
Documentation happens in the field, not at a workstation. Vitals, medication administration, and visit notes get logged from a patient's living room, often on a phone, sometimes with spotty connectivity.
Verification matters more, not less. Confirming a caregiver actually showed up, stayed the required time, and performed the right tasks is a harder trust problem than an in-facility EHR check-in.

Training Is the Other Half of the Problem

The part that's easy to overlook: home healthcare providers aren't just coordinating care, many are also training the caregivers who deliver it — CNAs, home health aides, and similar roles that need real hands-on competency, not just a certificate from a video course.

PRLT Healthcare is a home healthcare provider that also runs hands-on training programs for students entering the field — which is a useful example of why "training" and "service delivery" can't really be separate systems in this space. A training program that doesn't feed accurate competency data into the scheduling/matching side is just generating paperwork. A caregiver-matching system that doesn't know what a trainee is actually certified to do is a liability, not a feature.

What This Means If You're Building Anywhere Near This Space

Offline-first isn't optional for field documentation. If your app assumes a stable connection at the point of care, it'll fail exactly when accurate logging matters most.
Competency and certification data needs to be a first-class object, not a PDF attached to an HR file — it should be queryable by whatever system is doing caregiver-patient matching.
Verification (visit confirmation, time tracking, task completion) is a trust feature, not just an operations one. Families and regulators both care about it for different reasons.

Home healthcare scheduling, field documentation, and caregiver training are all solvable engineering problems — they're just unevenly solved right now, mostly because the industry has had to prioritize care delivery over tooling. If you've built anything in this space — visit verification, offline-capable field apps, training/competency tracking — I'd like to hear how you approached it. Drop it in the comments.

DEV Community: Devil