The technical SEO checklist I actually use

Most technical SEO checklists are inventories of everything that can be measured, which is a different thing from a list of what matters. After ten years of technical SEO on sites from national publishers to ten-page local businesses, this is the checklist I actually work through, in the order I work through it. The order is the point: it's sorted by how often each item is the thing quietly costing a site its rankings.

If you're new to the discipline, what technical SEO is covers the concepts; this is the practice.

1. Indexation: is the right stuff in the index?

Before measuring anything, look at what Google has actually indexed, because everything else is downstream of this.

• Compare indexed pages (Search Console's indexing report) against the pages you actually care about. Both directions matter: important pages missing, and junk present.
• Read the exclusion reasons in Search Console. "Crawled, currently not indexed" at scale usually means a quality or duplication problem, not a technical switch to flip.
• Check for accidental noindex tags and robots.txt blocks on money pages. It sounds too basic to check. Check it. Post-migration, this single item pays for more audits than anything else.
• Search site:yourdomain.com and skim. Parameter URLs, staging subdomains, and internal search results in the index are all common and all fixable.

2. Duplication and canonicals

• One URL per page. If a page resolves at http and https, with and without trailing slash, or with tracking parameters, everything should canonicalise (and ideally redirect) to a single version.
• Check that canonical tags say what you think. Templates go wrong silently: I've seen entire sections canonicalised to the homepage by one bad template variable.
• On ecommerce, check faceted and filtered URLs specifically. They're the biggest source of index bloat on stores.

3. Site architecture and internal linking

• Every important page reachable in three clicks or fewer from the homepage, roughly. Deep pages get crawled less and rank worse.
• Money pages should receive the most internal links. Run a crawl, sort by internal link count, and see whether the list matches your commercial priorities. On most sites it doesn't even slightly.
• No orphan pages (in the sitemap but linked from nowhere), no redirect chains eating link equity, no piles of links to 404s.
• Anchor text that says where the link goes. "Click here" tells search engines nothing.

4. Rendering and JavaScript

• Fetch key templates with Search Console's URL inspection and compare the rendered HTML to what users see. Anything critical missing from the rendered version is a problem.
• Content behind interactions (tabs, accordions, "load more") deserves special attention. If it matters for ranking, it should be in the HTML.
• If the site is a JavaScript framework build, confirm server-side rendering or static generation on every indexable route. This is a design decision on the sites I build, never an afterthought.

5. Speed and Core Web Vitals

• Judge on field data, not lab scores. The full detail is in my Core Web Vitals guide, but in short: real-user LCP, INP, and CLS from Search Console's report, worst templates first.
• The usual suspects: oversized hero images, lazy-loaded heroes, third-party scripts, and fonts loaded carelessly.

6. Structured data

• Product, Organization, Article, FAQ, LocalBusiness: whichever apply, present once, valid, and consistent with the visible page. Duplicate schema from competing plugins or apps is the most common fault.
• Test with Google's Rich Results tool rather than trusting the plugin that generated it.

7. Hygiene

• HTTPS everywhere, one redirect maximum from any legacy URL, a clean 404 that returns an actual 404 status, an XML sitemap containing only canonical, indexable URLs, and hreflang only if you genuinely serve multiple regions (half the hreflang I see does more harm than good).

What's deliberately not on this list

Crawl-to-fix ratios, "SEO health scores", meta keywords, text-to-HTML ratios, and W3C validation. None correlates with rankings. A checklist earns its keep by what it leaves out.

How to use it

Run the checks top to bottom, write down findings as you go, then stop and prioritise before fixing anything. Effort against impact, always: three items done that matter beat thirty ticked that don't. If you'd rather have senior eyes on it, this checklist is roughly the technical third of my full audit.

Technical SEO checklist FAQs

How long does a technical SEO check take?

A useful first pass on a small site takes a few hours with Search Console and a crawler. A proper audit of a large or ecommerce site takes days, most of it spent working out which findings matter rather than collecting them.

What tools do I need?

Google Search Console (non-negotiable and free), a crawler such as Screaming Frog, and PageSpeed Insights. Everything else is convenience.

How often should I run through this checklist?

Fully, once or twice a year and around any migration or redesign. Indexation and Core Web Vitals are worth a monthly glance in Search Console since they drift silently.