Technical SEO is the foundation everything else stands on. Use this 25-point checklist to find and fix the issues that silently hold your rankings back.
Crawling & indexing
- Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Submit an XML sitemap with only indexable URLs.
- Check robots.txt isn't blocking important pages.
- Fix "Crawled – currently not indexed" and "Discovered" issues.
- Use canonical tags to avoid duplicate content.
- Return proper 404 and 301 status codes.
Speed & Core Web Vitals
- Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5s.
- Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms.
- Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1.
- Serve modern image formats and set width/height.
- Lazy-load below-the-fold images.
- Enable caching, compression and a CDN.
Site structure
- Clean, descriptive URLs.
- Logical internal linking between related pages.
- Breadcrumbs with BreadcrumbList schema.
- No orphan pages.
On-page technical
- Unique title tags (≈50–60 characters).
- Unique meta descriptions.
- One clear H1 per page.
- Descriptive image alt text.
Structured data
- Organization / LocalBusiness schema.
- Service, Product, FAQ and Article schema where relevant.
Security & mobile
- HTTPS everywhere with HSTS.
- Mobile-friendly, responsive layouts.
AI crawlers
- Allow reputable AI crawlers and add an
llms.txtfile describing your site.
Don't want to do this alone? Our developers and SEO specialists fix technical SEO in-house. Get a free technical SEO audit.
Frequently asked questions
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO makes sure search engines can crawl, render, index and understand your website — covering speed, structure, schema, mobile and security.
What are Core Web Vitals?
Google's user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.
How often should I run a technical SEO audit?
At least quarterly, and always before and after a website redesign or migration.
