The Technical SEO Checklist I Run on Every Site

You can write the best content in your industry and still be invisible on Google if the technical foundations are broken. I see it constantly. The good news is most of it is fixable, and a lot of it is quick.

Here's the checklist I actually work through on an audit. Nothing groundbreaking, just the stuff that matters and that people keep getting wrong.

Can Google find and read your pages?

Start here, because if this is broken nothing else matters:

• Your robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking pages you want indexed (I've seen entire sites blocked by one stray line after a redesign).
• You've got an XML sitemap, it's current, and it's submitted in Search Console.
• Important pages return a 200. Redirects are 301, not 302, and you're not chaining five of them together.
• Canonical tags point at the right version of each page so you're not competing with yourself.

On-page basics

• Every page has its own title and meta description. Not duplicated, not auto-generated mush.
• One clear <h1> per page, with headings that actually describe the content.
• URLs that read like words, not ?id=8842&cat=12.
• Alt text on images that mean something.

Structured data

This is the bit people skip, and it's free wins. Structured data (schema.org) tells search engines what your content actually is, and it's what gets you those rich results - star ratings, FAQs, breadcrumbs in the listing.

Worth adding:

• Organization or LocalBusiness for the brand
• BreadcrumbList for navigation
• Article / BlogPosting on posts
• Product and FAQPage where they fit

Speed and mobile

• Passing Core Web Vitals on mobile (I wrote about why that matters here).
• Genuinely responsive, not a desktop site squashed onto a phone.
• HTTPS everywhere.

The bit nobody tells you

Technical SEO isn't a one-and-done job. Sites drift. Someone adds a plugin, a redirect gets missed, a dev pushes a noindex to staging and forgets to remove it (we've all done it). The sites that hold their rankings are the ones that get checked now and then, not set up once and forgotten.

That's the whole point of a website audit - catch this stuff before it quietly costs you traffic.