The technical SEO checklist we use on every audit

Most technical SEO checklists are either too shallow to be useful or so long that nothing gets fixed. This one is ordered the way we work through a real audit: can search engines find your pages, will they index them, and do those pages deliver a good experience?

How a URL gets into search results

1. DiscoverInternal links and XML sitemaps
2. Crawlrobots.txt allows the fetch; server responds
3. RenderJavaScript, CSS and images load
4. IndexCanonical, duplicates and quality assessed
5. RankRelevance, quality and page experience

1. Crawlability: can bots reach what matters?

Start with how search engines discover your site, not with page speed.

• robots.txt: Check that you aren’t blocking CSS, JavaScript or whole sections by accident. A single Disallow: / left over from staging has wiped out more traffic than any algorithm update.
• XML sitemaps: Include only canonical, indexable URLs that return a 200 status. Split large sites into sitemaps by type (products, categories, articles) so you can see indexing problems per template.
• Internal links: Every important page should be reachable within three or four clicks of the homepage. Orphan pages, with no internal links pointing to them, rarely perform.
• Crawl traps: Faceted filters, calendar widgets and session parameters can generate near-infinite URLs. Find them in a crawl, then confirm in your server logs. Our guides to faceted navigation and log-file analysis go deeper.

2. Indexability: will they keep it?

Search Console’s Page indexing report is the single most useful technical diagnostic you have.

• “Crawled – currently not indexed” usually means Google saw the page and decided it wasn’t valuable enough. That’s a quality or duplication problem, not a technical bug.
• “Discovered – currently not indexed” often points to crawl budget or weak internal linking.
• Canonicals: Make sure canonical tags point to the version you want ranked, and that they agree with your internal links, sitemaps and hreflang.
• Duplicate versions: HTTP and HTTPS, www and non-www, trailing slash or not. Pick one and 301-redirect the rest.

3. Core Web Vitals: is the experience good?

Google measures real-user experience through three metrics. Use field data (CrUX, Search Console) to decide what to fix and lab data (Lighthouse) to debug it.

Core Web Vitals thresholds

LCP Largest Contentful Paint · loading

Good≤ 2.5 sNeeds improvement2.5–4 sPoor> 4 s

INP Interaction to Next Paint · responsiveness

Good≤ 200 msNeeds improvement200–500 msPoor> 500 ms

CLS Cumulative Layout Shift · visual stability

Good≤ 0.1Needs improvement0.1–0.25Poor> 0.25

The usual culprits: unoptimised hero images (serve AVIF/WebP at the right size, and preload the LCP image), too many third-party scripts (tag managers, chat widgets, A/B tools), and images or ads without reserved dimensions. For the interaction metric, see INP in practice; for online shops, Core Web Vitals for e-commerce shows how to work template by template.

4. Rendering: does the content exist without JavaScript?

If your site is built in React, Vue or another JavaScript framework, view the rendered HTML in Search Console’s URL Inspection tool. Key content, links and metadata should be present in the initial HTML, ideally through server-side rendering or static generation. Content that appears only after a click or scroll may never be indexed. We cover rendering strategies and how to test them in JavaScript SEO: what Googlebot actually sees.

5. Structured data: are you eligible for rich results?

Add JSON-LD that matches what is visible on the page: Organization, BreadcrumbList, Product and Offer, Article, LocalBusiness. Validate it with the Rich Results Test and monitor the enhancement reports in Search Console. Keep expectations realistic: Google stopped showing FAQ rich results altogether in May 2026, after years of limiting them to government and health sites, and HowTo results were retired before that. Our review of structured data in 2025 lists the types that still earn rich results.

6. International and multi-language setup

If you serve more than one country or language, implement hreflang with reciprocal links and a sensible x-default. Errors here cause the wrong version to rank in the wrong country. We see this constantly with UK/US English sites, and we’ve collected the usual causes in seven hreflang mistakes.

7. Migrations: the highest-risk moment

Redesigns, re-platforms and domain changes are when sites lose the most traffic. Non-negotiables:

1. A complete URL inventory from crawls, analytics, Search Console and backlinks.
2. A one-to-one redirect map to the closest equivalent page, with no blanket redirects to the homepage.
3. Content and metadata parity checked on staging.
4. Launch-day monitoring of status codes, logs and indexing, then weekly checks for at least two months.

The full plan, week by week, is in our guide to migrating a website without losing traffic.

How to prioritise

Score every issue on impact (how many important pages it affects, and how badly) and effort (developer time and risk). Fix high-impact, low-effort issues first, schedule the high-impact, high-effort ones and leave the rest. A short list that gets shipped beats a 200-row spreadsheet that doesn’t.

Prioritising audit findings

Impact →

Quick winsPlan as projectsFill-insDeprioritiserobots.txt blockRedirect chainsMissing canonicalsSite migrationFaceted URLsAlt text gapsTemplate rebuild

Effort →

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Want us to run this checklist on your site? Request a free SEO audit and a senior strategist will send you your top priorities within 48 hours.