Technical SEO is table stakes — get it right once
Technical SEO does not win rankings by itself; it removes the reasons you lose. A site with perfect content and a misconfigured robots.txt ranks for nothing. The good news: technical SEO is a finite, completable checklist. Run these 21 checks at launch, re-audit quarterly, and the technical layer stops being a variable in your growth.
Crawling & indexing (checks 1-6)
**1. Robots.txt** — exists, and does not block what you want ranked (test with any free robots tester). **2. XML sitemap** — generated, clean (only 200-status canonical URLs), and submitted to Google Search Console. **3. Indexation** — `site:yourdomain.com` returns your key pages; investigate anything important missing. **4. HTTPS everywhere** — every URL, every resource, with proper redirects from http. **5. One canonical version** — www vs non-www and trailing-slash consistency, enforced by redirects. **6. No orphan pages** — every important page reachable by internal links within 3 clicks of the homepage.
Speed & mobile (checks 7-11)
**7. Core Web Vitals pass** — check PageSpeed Insights; LCP under 2.5s is the metric that most often fails. **8. Image discipline** — compressed (free compressors handle this), modern formats (WebP), explicit dimensions to prevent layout shift. **9. Minimal render-blocking** — defer non-critical JavaScript; inline critical CSS. **10. Mobile usability** — Google indexes mobile-first, so test on actual phones, not just a resized browser. **11. Font loading** — `font-display: swap` so text renders immediately instead of flashing invisible.
Structure & markup (checks 12-17)
**12. One H1 per page**, containing the page's primary keyword. **13. Logical heading hierarchy** — H2s for sections, no skipped levels used for styling. **14. Title tags** — unique, 50-60 characters, primary keyword early. **15. Meta descriptions** — unique, 150-160 characters, written to earn the click. **16. Structured data** — Organization schema sitewide; Article schema on posts; FAQ schema where you have genuine FAQs (validate with Google's Rich Results Test). **17. Descriptive alt text** — every meaningful image, for accessibility and image search.
Advanced & international (checks 18-21)
**18. Hreflang** — if you target multiple countries or languages, every page needs return-linked hreflang annotations; mistakes here silently split your rankings. **19. Canonical tags** — on every page, self-referencing where appropriate, preventing duplicate-content dilution. **20. 404 and redirect hygiene** — no broken internal links (crawl with Semrush Site Audit or a free crawler), and old URLs 301-redirect to their successors. **21. Search Console monitoring** — the ongoing layer: coverage errors, manual actions, and Core Web Vitals reports reviewed monthly.
The tooling and the cadence
The full audit stack costs little: Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights (free), a free meta/schema/robots toolkit for generation and validation, and Semrush Site Audit ($3 via group buy) for scheduled crawls that catch regressions automatically. Launch with all 21 green, re-run the crawl monthly, and spend your energy where it compounds — content and links — confident the foundation is not leaking.
