Technical SEO is the unglamorous half of SEO — the part that determines whether search engines can even properly access and understand your content, regardless of how good that content is. Here are the 12 things we check on every audit, in the order they typically matter.
1. Crawlability
Can search engine bots actually reach your pages? We check robots.txt for accidental blocks, confirm important pages aren’t being disallowed, and look for orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them.
2. Indexing Status
Are your important pages actually indexed, and are unimportant ones (like internal search results or duplicate filter pages) correctly kept out of the index? We check Google Search Console’s coverage report for both problems.
3. XML Sitemap Accuracy
Does your sitemap list your real, live, canonical pages — and only those? A sitemap full of broken links or outdated URLs actively wastes crawl budget.
4. Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift all factor into ranking and, more importantly, directly affect whether visitors stay. We check real-world field data, not just a lab score.
5. Mobile Usability
With mobile-first indexing standard, we check that the mobile version of every key page is fully functional and not missing content present on desktop.
6. HTTPS and Security
Full-site HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings is table stakes at this point, but it’s still worth confirming on every audit, especially after a migration.
7. Canonical Tags
Duplicate or near-duplicate content (common with filtered category pages, tracking parameters, or www/non-www variants) needs correct canonical tags so search engines consolidate ranking signals to one URL instead of splitting them.
8. Structured Data (Schema Markup)
Proper schema (Organization, Article, FAQ, Product, as relevant) helps search engines — and increasingly AI answer engines — understand exactly what a page is about. This is also foundational to good AEO.
9. Internal Linking Structure
Are your most important pages linked to from elsewhere on the site, with reasonably descriptive anchor text? A page with no internal links pointing to it is both harder to discover and signals lower importance.
10. URL Structure
Clean, logical, human-readable URLs that reflect the site’s actual hierarchy, without unnecessary parameters or duplicated path segments.
11. Redirect Chains and Broken Links
Multi-hop redirect chains (A to B to C) waste crawl budget and slow page load; we flag and flatten these, along with any 404s from internal links.
12. Hreflang (for Multi-Region Sites)
For businesses serving multiple countries or languages — relevant to a site with pages across, for example, 17 target markets — correct hreflang tags prevent search engines from showing the wrong regional page to the wrong audience.
None of these 12 items is exotic; the value is in checking all of them systematically instead of assuming a site is fine because it “looks” fine. This checklist is the starting point of our own SEO engagements, before any content or link-building work begins.
Why We Check These Before Touching Content
It’s tempting to jump straight to writing more content or building links, since those feel like the visible, exciting parts of SEO. But content and links built on top of unresolved technical issues underperform — there’s little point writing an excellent article if it’s accidentally blocked from indexing, or building links to a page that redirects through three hops and loses most of its signal along the way. Technical SEO is deliberately unglamorous, but skipping it means every other SEO investment works less efficiently than it should.
How Often This Should Be Re-Checked
A full 12-point pass isn’t a one-time task. Site migrations, redesigns, plugin or CMS updates, and even routine content publishing can quietly reintroduce issues like broken canonical tags or orphaned pages. We recommend a full technical re-check at least quarterly for an actively maintained site, and immediately after any significant site change, rather than treating the initial audit as a permanent fix.
Tools We Use to Run This Checklist
We don’t claim official partner or certified status with any of the tools below — they’re simply the standard, widely available software the industry runs technical audits on. Google Search Console and GA4 cover indexing status, coverage issues and real-world Core Web Vitals field data. A standard site-crawling tool surfaces broken links, redirect chains and duplicate content at scale. Schema validation tools confirm structured data is implemented correctly rather than just present. None of this requires exotic or proprietary tooling — consistency in applying it is what actually matters.