A technical SEO checklist keeps audits consistent and makes sure nothing critical slips through. Here’s a practical order to work through:
1. Crawlability: Confirm robots.txt isn’t blocking important pages, submit an updated XML sitemap, and check Search Console’s Crawl Stats report for crawl errors.
2. Indexability: Search site:yourdomain.com to spot-check indexed pages, review the Coverage report for “excluded” pages, and confirm no accidental noindex tags exist on important URLs.
3. Site speed: Run key pages through PageSpeed Insights and check Core Web Vitals (LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1) using real field data, not just lab scores.
4. Mobile usability: Test on an actual phone, not just responsive design mode — check for tap targets that are too small and text that’s too tiny to read.
5. HTTPS and security: Confirm the whole site loads over HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings.
6. Structured data: Validate schema markup with Google’s Rich Results Test to catch errors before they suppress rich snippets.
7. Internal linking and redirects: Scan for broken links, redirect chains (more than one hop), and orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them.
8. Duplicate content: Check for duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, and near-identical page content, and confirm canonical tags are set correctly.
Running through these eight areas covers the majority of technical issues that actually move rankings.
