Technical SEO checklist

The first step in technical SEO is making sure Google can access the pages you want to rank and doesn’t waste time crawling those you don’t. The robots.txt file controls which paths the bot can and cannot crawl, while robots meta tags (index/noindex, follow/nofollow) determine which pages get indexed.

Regularly review the coverage report in Google Search Console to detect pages excluded by mistake, incorrect redirects or server errors that prevent indexation.

Since 2021, Core Web Vitals have been confirmed ranking factors by Google. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), INP (Interaction to Next Paint) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measure the loading speed of the main content, responsiveness to interactions and visual stability respectively.

Optimising speed involves working on multiple fronts: image compression, eliminating render-blocking resources, CDN usage, lazy loading, CSS and JavaScript minification, and an effective caching strategy.

Google indexes and ranks based on the mobile version of your site. If your website has content, links or features that only appear on desktop, Google won’t see them. Make sure the mobile experience is complete, not a stripped-down version.

Verify that buttons are large enough to tap, text is readable without zooming, there’s no horizontal scrolling and pop-ups don’t block content on mobile.

A clean, hierarchical URL structure makes both crawling and site comprehension easier. URLs should be descriptive, use hyphens as separators, avoid unnecessary parameters and reflect the content hierarchy.

Click depth (the number of clicks from the homepage to a page) should be three at most for important pages. This ensures the bot can access all your content without exhausting the crawl budget.

A 301 redirect transfers authority from an old URL to a new one and is essential during migrations. Redirect chains (A→B→C) waste crawl budget and dilute authority: always point redirects directly to the final destination.

Canonical tags tell Google which version of a page is preferred when multiple URLs exist with similar content (due to parameters, pagination, HTTP/HTTPS variants). An incorrect implementation can cause Google to ignore your most important pages.

Structured data explicitly communicates the type and meaning of your content to search engines. Implement the schemas relevant to your business type: Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article, FAQPage or BreadcrumbList as appropriate.

The XML sitemap is your direct channel to Google for indicating which pages exist, when they were last updated and their relative priority. Keep the sitemap up to date, exclude noindexed pages and submit it via Search Console.

HTTPS has been a ranking factor since 2014 and is now a baseline requirement. Browsers label sites without an SSL certificate as “Not Secure,” which destroys user trust. Ensure all pages load over HTTPS with no mixed content.

Properly configure HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security), redirect all HTTP variants to HTTPS and verify that internal resources (images, scripts, stylesheets) load over HTTPS to avoid mixed-content warnings.