Technical SEO Checklist — A Practical Guide to Ongoing Site Health

A technical SEO checklist is one of the most useful tools you can have for maintaining and improving a website’s organic performance. Used regularly, it ensures that technical issues do not accumulate unnoticed — a common problem on sites that are actively developed, migrated, or expanded.

This checklist is structured around the core areas of technical SEO and is designed for ongoing use rather than as a one-off audit exercise. If you are preparing for a specific audit rather than routine maintenance, the SEO audit checklist may be more appropriate.

For background on why each of these areas matters, see the full guide to technical SEO.

1. Crawlability

  • Check robots.txt is not blocking any pages or directories that should be accessible to search engines
  • Confirm there are no noindex directives on pages that should be indexed — check both meta robots tags and X-Robots-Tag HTTP headers
  • Verify that the XML sitemap is up to date, contains only indexable URLs, and is submitted in Google Search Console
  • Check that all important pages are reachable within three clicks from the homepage
  • Identify and resolve any redirect chains — each redirect should resolve in a single hop where possible
  • Find and address orphan pages — pages with no internal links pointing to them
  • Review crawl errors in Google Search Console and resolve any 4xx or 5xx responses on important URLs

2. Indexation

  • Use Google Search Console’s Coverage report to identify pages excluded from the index and understand why
  • Check for duplicate content issues — use site: searches and canonical tags to identify and consolidate duplicate or near-duplicate pages
  • Verify that canonical tags are correctly implemented — pointing to the right URL and not creating circular references
  • Confirm that paginated series are handled correctly, with self-referencing canonicals or appropriate rel=next/prev signals
  • Check for soft 404s — pages that return a 200 status code but show empty, error, or placeholder content
  • Use the URL Inspection tool to check the indexed status of key pages and review what Googlebot last saw

3. Site architecture and internal linking

  • Review the internal link structure of your most important pages — are they receiving links from enough relevant pages?
  • Check that hub pages and category pages have strong internal linking from their supporting content
  • Identify pages with only one or two internal links pointing to them that should be receiving more
  • Confirm that breadcrumb navigation is implemented and linking correctly up the page hierarchy
  • Review anchor text diversity across internal links — over-optimised exact-match anchor text on internal links can look unnatural
  • Check that no important pages are more than three to four clicks from the homepage

4. Page speed and Core Web Vitals

  • Check Core Web Vitals status in Google Search Console — identify which pages are failing LCP, CLS, or INP thresholds
  • Run key pages through PageSpeed Insights and address the highest-impact recommendations
  • Verify that images are compressed, correctly sized, and served in a modern format such as WebP
  • Check that images above the fold have explicit width and height attributes to prevent layout shifts (CLS)
  • Review render-blocking JavaScript and CSS — defer or async load where possible
  • Audit third-party scripts — remove any that are not actively needed, as they are a common cause of both speed and layout shift issues
  • Check server response time (TTFB) — consistently above 600ms is worth investigating at the hosting or caching layer

5. Mobile usability

  • Check Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report for any reported issues
  • Test key pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to confirm responsive behaviour
  • Check that tap targets (buttons, links) are appropriately sized and spaced for touch interaction
  • Verify that no content is wider than the viewport, which can cause horizontal scrolling on mobile
  • Confirm that font sizes are readable without zooming on smaller screens

6. Structured data

  • Test key pages with Google’s Rich Results Test and resolve any validation errors
  • Check Search Console’s Enhancement reports for structured data errors across the site
  • Verify that schema markup reflects the actual content of each page — mismatched or misleading structured data can result in manual actions
  • Ensure Organisation, WebSite, and BreadcrumbList schema are implemented at the site level
  • Add or review schema for any pages eligible for rich results — FAQs, services, reviews, articles

7. International SEO (if applicable)

  • Validate hreflang implementation using a dedicated hreflang checker — errors in hreflang are extremely common and can cause indexing conflicts
  • Confirm that every language/region URL has a return hreflang tag pointing back to itself
  • Check that hreflang tags are consistent between the HTML head, HTTP headers, and XML sitemap
  • Verify that geo-targeting settings in Google Search Console are correctly configured for country-specific domains or subdirectories

8. Security and technical basics

  • Confirm the site is fully served over HTTPS with no mixed content warnings
  • Check that HTTP URLs redirect to HTTPS equivalents and that www/non-www versions resolve consistently
  • Verify that the correct canonical domain is set and consistent across the site
  • Check that there are no unnecessary URL parameters creating duplicate content
  • Ensure a valid SSL certificate is in place and not approaching expiry

How often to run this checklist

For most websites, a full technical SEO review every quarter is sufficient to catch issues before they compound. For sites that are actively developed, running through the crawlability and indexation sections monthly is worthwhile — development changes are the most common source of new technical SEO problems.

For a faster diagnostic, try the technical SEO priority scorer  — check which issues apply to your site and get a prioritised action list in minutes.

If you have identified a significant issue through this checklist and need help understanding its impact or fixing it, find out more about my technical SEO services or book a technical SEO audit for a full site analysis with prioritised recommendations.

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