Most SEO advice focuses on content and backlinks — write good stuff, get other sites to link to it. That's still true. But content can't rank if Google can't crawl it, understand it, or trust the site it's sitting on.
Technical SEO is the foundation everything else sits on, and it's the part most businesses never actually check.
Here's the checklist we run on every project, grouped by what it actually affects.
Crawlability & indexing
If Google can't find and read a page, nothing else on this list matters.
- XML sitemap submitted in Google Search Console and referenced in robots.txt
- robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking pages you want indexed (a shockingly common launch-day mistake)
- Canonical tags on every page, pointing to the correct version — especially important if you have URL parameters, filtered pages, or both www and non-www versions live
- No orphan pages — every page you care about should be reachable through internal links, not just the sitemap
- Redirect chains cleaned up — a redirects to b redirects to c wastes crawl budget and dilutes link equity; redirect straight to the final destination
Site architecture
- Clean, descriptive URLs:
/services/seobeats/page?id=482 - Logical internal linking: Important pages should be a few clicks from the homepage, not buried
- Breadcrumbs on deeper pages, both for users and for the structured data benefit
- One clear H1 per page, with a logical heading hierarchy underneath it (this one also just makes pages easier to read, which matters for humans too)
Performance
Google uses real-world loading, responsiveness, and visual stability as ranking signals — not as a tiebreaker, but as a factor. At minimum:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5 seconds
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200 milliseconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1
If you're not sure where you stand, see why your website is slow and how to fix it.
Mobile-friendliness
Google indexes the mobile version of your site by default. A site that works on desktop but breaks, overflows, or hides content on mobile is being judged on the broken version, not the good one.
Structured data (schema markup)
Schema doesn't directly boost rankings, but it helps Google understand what a page is — and it's what unlocks rich results (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs) in search. Worth adding at minimum:
- Organization schema sitewide
- Article schema on blog posts
- FAQPage schema on any page with a genuine Q&A section
- BreadcrumbList schema alongside visible breadcrumbs
Security & trust signals
- HTTPS everywhere, with no mixed-content warnings
- No broken links — internal or external; a periodic crawl catches these before Google does
- Accurate, consistent NAP (name, address, phone) if you have a local/regional presence — inconsistency across the web quietly undermines local SEO
Content quality signals (E-E-A-T)
Technical, but content-adjacent: Google evaluates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness — real author information, evidence of who's behind the content, and no thin or duplicated pages competing with each other for the same keyword.
Where to actually start
If you've never done a technical audit, don't try to fix all of this in one sitting. Start with crawlability (can Google even see your important pages?), then performance, then structured data. Everything else compounds from there.
Not sure which of these your site is actually failing? We run a full technical audit as step one of every engagement — no guesswork, just a prioritized list of what to fix first.