Most technical SEO checklists online are either too generic to be useful or written for developers who already know what a canonical tag does. This one is neither. It's organized the way we actually work through a site audit, starting with the fixes that stop Google from finding your content at all, and moving toward the ones that make content perform better once it's already indexed.
Not every item applies to every site. Treat this as a filter, not a mandate: work through it and flag what's actually broken on your own site before spending time on anything else.
Crawlability and indexing (the foundation everything else depends on)
If Google can't crawl and index a page properly, nothing else on this list matters for that page.
- Submit and maintain a clean XML sitemap. It should only include indexable pages, no redirects, no 404s, no pages blocked by robots.txt.
- Audit robots.txt for accidental blocks. This is more common than it should be. A rule meant to block a staging environment sometimes ends up blocking the entire production site, or a well-intentioned rule blocks AI crawlers along with everything else.
- Fix orphaned pages. Pages with no internal links pointing to them are much harder for Google to find and rarely get crawled with any regularity.
- Resolve crawl errors in Google Search Console. The Coverage and Pages reports will show exactly what's blocked, excluded, or erroring.
- Check for crawl budget waste on large sites. Faceted navigation and infinite filter combinations can generate thousands of near-duplicate URLs that eat crawl budget Google could be spending on pages that actually matter.
Site architecture and internal linking
- Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage. Deep architecture buries pages that could otherwise rank well.
- Fix broken internal links. A surprisingly high number of sites accumulate these silently after redesigns or content deletions nobody cleaned up afterward.
- Implement a logical URL structure. Clean, descriptive URLs help both users and search engines understand a page's place in the site hierarchy.
- Use breadcrumb navigation with matching schema markup, which helps both usability and how Google displays the page in results.
- Audit and consolidate redirect chains. A page redirecting to a page redirecting to a page wastes crawl budget and dilutes link equity at every hop.
Core Web Vitals and page experience
- Optimize images with proper compression and modern formats like WebP, still one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort fixes available.
- Eliminate render-blocking resources that delay when the browser can start showing content.
- Reserve space for images and embeds to prevent layout shift as the page loads.
- Audit third-party scripts (chat widgets, tracking pixels, ad tags) and remove anything that isn't earning its load-time cost.
- Confirm mobile usability using Search Console's mobile usability report, not just a visual glance on your own phone.
Structured data and schema markup
- Implement Organization and website schema sitewide so search engines have consistent, machine-readable information about who you are.
- Add Article schema to blog and content pages, which supports both traditional rich results and AI search citation.
- Use FAQ schema on pages that genuinely answer common questions, not as a manipulation tactic on pages that don't.
- Validate all schema with Google's Rich Results Test before assuming it's working. Broken schema often fails silently.
- Add Product and Review schema where relevant for ecommerce, since this directly affects how listings appear in search results.
Content and on-page fixes
- Eliminate duplicate title tags and meta descriptions. Search Console's HTML Improvements data (or a crawl tool like Screaming Frog) will surface these quickly.
- Fix duplicate or thin content, particularly common on ecommerce category pages and templated location pages that were copy-pasted with minimal variation.
- Confirm canonical tags point to the correct version of each page, especially on sites with both www and non-www, or http and https, versions still technically accessible.
- Add alt text to images that actually describes the image, both for accessibility and because it's still a genuine ranking signal Google uses to understand visual content.
Security and technical hygiene
- Confirm HTTPS is enforced sitewide, with no mixed content warnings and no accessible unencrypted version of any page.
- Set up proper redirect handling for any legacy URLs, using 301s rather than 302s where the change is permanent.
Where to actually start
If you only have time to fix a handful of these, start with crawlability. A perfectly optimized page that Google can't find or won't index is worth nothing, and that's the category most likely to be silently broken on sites that haven't had a proper technical audit in a while. Everything else on this list matters, but it only matters once Google can actually see the page you fixed.