Technical SEO Checklist: What to Check, in What Order
Most technical SEO problems on small sites come down to a handful of things: Google can't reach a page, Google reaches it but is told not to index it, or Google indexes the wrong version. Speed scores and fancy schema matter far less than those three. This checklist is ordered with that in mind, so if you only have an afternoon, work from the top.
I use roughly this order when a new client sends over a site, whether it's a Shopify store selling handloom sarees or a SaaS tool with a marketing blog bolted on.
1. Can Google crawl the site?
Start with access. If Googlebot is blocked, nothing else on this list matters.
- Open
yoursite.com/robots.txtand read it line by line. A strayDisallow: /left over from a staging site is more common than you'd think. Our robots.txt guide explains each directive. - Check that the server returns a 200 status for your key pages, not a 403 from a firewall or a security plugin that dislikes bots.
- In Google Search Console, use the URL Inspection tool on your homepage and a couple of money pages. It tells you whether Google could fetch the page and what it saw.
2. Can Google index the pages you care about?
Crawling and indexing are separate steps. A page can be crawled and still kept out of the index.
- Look for
noindexin meta robots tags and in theX-Robots-TagHTTP header. WordPress has a "Discourage search engines" checkbox that adds this site-wide, and it gets left on after launch. - Open the Pages report in Search Console. The "Why pages aren't indexed" section lists reasons such as "Crawled, currently not indexed" and "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". Each reason points to a different fix.
- Check canonical tags on important pages. A product page whose canonical points at the category page is telling Google to ignore it. See canonical tags for the common mistakes.
3. Is there one clean version of the site?
http://, https://, www and non-www should all end up at one version through a single 301 redirect. Test all four in a browser or with a redirect checker. Chains like http to https to www to a trailing-slash version waste crawl time and leak a little reliability every hop.
Also check that the site has a valid SSL certificate with no mixed-content warnings. HTTPS and SEO covers the migration side if you haven't moved yet.
4. Sitemap and internal links
- Submit an XML sitemap in Search Console. It should list only canonical, indexable URLs that return 200. If you need one quickly, the free sitemap generator builds a basic file.
- Make sure every important page is reachable through normal links from other pages. Sitemaps help discovery, but internal links are what tell Google a page matters.
- Find orphan pages (pages nothing links to) by comparing your sitemap with a crawl from a tool like Screaming Frog.
5. Status codes and broken links
Run a crawl and sort by status code.
| Status | What to do |
|---|---|
| 404 on pages with backlinks or traffic | 301 to the closest relevant page |
| 404 on junk URLs | Leave them, a 404 is fine |
| 302 used for permanent moves | Change to 301 |
| 5xx errors | Talk to your host, these hurt crawling |
| Redirect chains of 3+ hops | Point the first URL straight at the final one |
The broken link checker is handy for spot checks on individual pages.
6. Mobile and page experience
Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Load your pages on an actual phone, not just a resized desktop browser. Check that content, headings and internal links on mobile match desktop. Hidden tabs are fine; missing content is not.
For speed, look at Core Web Vitals in Search Console rather than chasing a perfect Lighthouse score. A local bakery site in Jaipur scoring 70 on mobile Lighthouse can rank perfectly well if the content answers the search. Fix the obvious things: oversized images, a slow theme, five chat widgets loading at once.
7. Structured data
Add schema that matches what the page actually is: Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage, Product on product pages, Article on posts, BreadcrumbList across the site. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test. Don't mark up content that isn't visible on the page.
This is lower on the list on purpose. Schema can earn rich results, but it rarely rescues a page that has indexing problems.
8. International and duplicate content
If you serve different countries or languages, check hreflang. If you run filters, sorting or tracking parameters, check that they don't create thousands of near-identical indexable URLs. Ecommerce sites are the usual offenders here.
9. Monitoring
Technical SEO is not a one-time job. Set up:
- Search Console email alerts (they're on by default, just make sure the right person receives them).
- A monthly crawl of the site to catch new 404s, redirect chains and stray noindex tags.
- A quick check after every theme update, plugin install or site migration. Most disasters I've cleaned up started with "we just changed the theme".
How much of this do you actually need?
A 20-page service business site needs items 1 to 4 checked properly and the rest glanced at. A 50,000-URL store needs all of it, plus log file analysis and crawl budget work. Don't let a 200-item audit spreadsheet distract you from the three or four issues that are actually stopping pages from showing up.
Pick the first section on this list, open Search Console, and run the URL Inspection tool on your five most important pages today. Whatever it reports is your starting point.