Technical SEO has a scale problem. Run any audit tool and it will hand you hundreds of findings, sorted by how easy they were to detect rather than by how much they cost you. The result is teams spending a quarter on image alt text while a rendering bug keeps half the site out of the index.
This checklist is ordered by consequence. Work down it, and stop when the remaining items stop changing anything.
1. Can Google see your content at all
This is the only item that can be catastrophic, and it is the one most often missed, because the site looks perfect in your browser.
Modern JavaScript sites can render fine for a person and return nearly nothing to a crawler. If the page is assembled in the browser after load, and something in the assembly fails or blocks, what gets indexed is an empty shell.
Test it the blunt way: fetch the page as raw HTML and read what comes back. If your headline and body copy are not in there, nothing else on this list matters yet. Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to see the rendered version Google actually holds.
2. Is anything telling search engines to stay away
The three ways to accidentally hide a page from search are all one line long, which is why they survive so long unnoticed.
- A noindex meta tag left over from staging
- A Disallow line in robots.txt that is broader than intended
- A canonical tag on every page pointing at the homepage
3. One URL per piece of content
Duplicate URLs split your signals. The same page reachable with and without a trailing slash, with and without www, over http and https, and with tracking parameters attached is five versions of one page as far as a crawler is concerned.
Pick one form, redirect the others to it with a permanent redirect, and set a self-referencing canonical on the winner. This is boring and it is one of the highest return fixes available on an older site.
4. Speed, but only the parts that count
Page speed is a ranking factor and a much bigger conversion factor. It is also where the most time gets wasted chasing a score instead of an experience.
Three things account for most real world slowness: images that are far larger than the space they occupy, fonts that block the first paint, and third party scripts. Analytics, chat widgets, heat maps and ad pixels each add a request and some add several.
Fix images first. Serve them at the size they are displayed, in a modern format, and let anything below the fold load lazily. That single change often does more than every other optimisation combined.
5. Mobile is the version that gets indexed
Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Not the desktop one. If content, links or structured data exist on desktop and are hidden on mobile, treat them as absent.
Check that tap targets are large enough to hit, that text is readable without zoom, and that nothing important sits behind a hover, because there is no hover on a phone.
6. A sitemap that reflects reality
A sitemap is a hint, not a command, but a wrong one wastes crawl budget and muddies your own diagnostics.
It should list every page you want indexed, and only those. No redirects, no noindexed pages, no dead URLs. Generate it from the same source of truth the site renders from, so it cannot drift, and submit it in Search Console once.
7. Structured data where it earns something
Schema markup does not raise rankings directly. It changes how your result looks, which changes how many people click it, which is worth more than the ranking argument anyway.
The types that pay for themselves are Article on posts, FAQPage where you genuinely answer questions, Product where you sell, LocalBusiness where you have premises, and Breadcrumb almost everywhere. Mark up what is actually on the page. Marking up content the reader cannot see is a violation and it does get penalised.
8. Internal links are technical too
Crawlers reach pages by following links. A page with no internal links pointing at it is an orphan, and being in the sitemap is a weaker signal than being linked from somewhere real.
Check that every page you care about is reachable within three clicks of the homepage, and that the links are real anchor tags with real href values rather than click handlers on a div.
What to skip
A short list of things that occupy audits and rarely change outcomes: keyword density, meta keywords, chasing a perfect score in any speed tool, alt text on decorative images, and the H1 count debate. Alt text matters for accessibility and image search, which is a good enough reason on its own, but it is not the thing standing between you and page one.
How often to do this
Items one and two are worth checking monthly and after every deploy that touches routing or rendering, because they are the ones that fail silently and catastrophically.
The rest is a quarterly pass. Technical SEO is not a project you finish, but it is also not a place most sites should spend most of their time. Once the crawler can see everything and there is one URL per page, the next best hour goes into the content, not the config.
Common questions
- How do I know if Google can actually see my pages?
- Fetch the page as raw HTML and read what comes back. If your headline and body copy are not in there, a crawler may be getting an empty shell even though the page looks fine in your browser. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows the version Google actually holds.
- How often should I run a technical SEO audit?
- Check crawlability and accidental noindex monthly and after any deploy that touches routing or rendering, because those fail silently and catastrophically. Everything else is a quarterly pass.
- Does page speed really affect rankings?
- It is a real but modest ranking factor and a much larger conversion factor. Fix oversized images first, which usually does more than every other speed optimisation combined.
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