Technical SEO is the foundation of every successful organic strategy. Even brilliant content struggles if search engines cannot crawl, render or understand your pages. Use this checklist to find the issues that hold your website back.

1. Crawling and indexing

  • Check the Pages report in Google Search Console for “Crawled – currently not indexed” and “Discovered – not indexed”.
  • Make sure robots.txt does not block important sections, CSS or JavaScript.
  • Submit a clean XML sitemap that only includes indexable, canonical URLs.
  • Use canonical tags consistently to consolidate duplicate URLs.

2. Site architecture

  • Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage.
  • Use descriptive, lowercase, hyphenated URLs.
  • Add breadcrumb navigation and breadcrumb schema.
  • Fix orphan pages by linking to them from relevant content.

3. Speed and Core Web Vitals

  • Compress and serve images in modern formats with explicit dimensions.
  • Defer non-critical JavaScript and remove unused third-party scripts.
  • Use caching and a CDN.
  • Monitor LCP, INP and CLS using real-user data, not just lab scores.

4. Structured data

Add Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, Product, Article, FAQ and Breadcrumb schema where relevant, and validate it with the Rich Results Test.

5. Redirects and errors

  • Fix broken internal links and 404s that receive traffic or links.
  • Replace redirect chains with single 301 redirects.
  • Plan migrations with a complete URL map before launch.

Need a hand?

If this list feels overwhelming, start with a technical SEO audit. It will tell you exactly which fixes will make the biggest difference first.