The Technical SEO Checklist We Run Before Any Campaign

Content gets the credit, but technical SEO decides whether that content can rank at all. Before we write a single brief or pitch a single link, we run the same 27-point audit on every new client site. It takes about a week. It routinely uncovers issues three previous agencies missed.

Here is the checklist, section by section, with notes on why each item matters and what tools we use to verify it.

1. Crawlability and indexation

If Google cannot efficiently crawl and index your pages, nothing else on this list matters. We start here every time.

• Crawl the full site with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, not just a sample. Sort errors by template so fixes scale across thousands of URLs at once.
• Read robots.txt like an adversary. We look for legacy blocks from old staging environments that quietly wall off whole directories.
• Compare crawled vs. indexed. A large gap between what you serve and what Google indexes points to quality thresholds or canonical conflicts.
• Audit XML sitemaps. Only canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs belong there. Stale sitemaps waste crawl budget and hide real problems.
• Check log files where available. Server logs show what Googlebot actually requests, including the pages it ignores entirely.

2. Rendering and JavaScript

More sites break rendering than any teams realize. Google does execute JavaScript, but imperfectly and on a delay.

• Render key templates headlessly and diff the DOM against raw HTML. Missing headings or links after render means content lives behind fragile JS.
• Verify pagination, filters and faceted navigation produce crawlable URLs rather than infinite scroll dead ends.
• Test internal search pages for accidental indexation of empty-result templates, the classic soft-404 factory.

3. Core Web Vitals and speed

Vitals are a tiebreaker more than a rocket, but they compound with everything else. We prioritize fixes by field data from CrUX, not lab scores alone.

• LCP: usually an oversized hero image or late-loading font. Preload the hero asset and self-host fonts.
• INP: almost always third-party scripts piling onto the main thread. Audit every tag in your container and delete half.
• CLS: reserve space for ads, embeds and late images with explicit dimensions.

4. Canonicals and duplicates

Duplicate content rarely triggers penalties; it just splits signals until nothing ranks well.

• Every page self-canonicals unless it is a deliberate variant.
• Check parameter handling: tracking parameters must resolve to clean canonicals, never index as separate URLs.
• HTTP to HTTPS and non-www to www redirects must be single-hop, permanent and consistent with canonical tags.
• Print versions, session IDs and sort orders get noindexed or canonicalized away.

5. Structured data

Schema will not lift rankings by magic, but it unlocks rich results and removes ambiguity about what your pages mean.

• Organization and WebSite on the homepage, referenced sitewide via @id.
• Product with price and availability on commerce templates, validated against actual page content.
• Article/BlogPosting with real author entities on editorial pages.
• BreadcrumbList wherever visible breadcrumbs exist.
• Everything tested in the Rich Results Test, not trusted because the plugin says it injected something.

We have never finished a week-one audit without finding at least five issues worth fixing immediately. The record is forty-one.

6. Architecture and internal linking

Finally, we map how authority flows. Important pages should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage, orphan pages should number zero, and anchor text should describe destinations honestly.

• Visualize click depth; anything valuable beyond depth four gets linked from hub pages.
• Hunt orphans: pages with zero inbound internal links are invisible to both users and crawlers.
• Fix broken internal links and redirect chains that leak equity hop by hop.

Where to start on your own site

If you only have one afternoon, do this: run a full crawl, fix every 404 and redirect chain, make sure your sitemap contains only live canonical URLs, and check Search Console for manual actions and indexing anomalies. That afternoon routinely produces the fastest ranking movement of any SEO work you can do.

Or skip the learning curve and request our free audit. We run this exact checklist and send you the prioritized results, whether or not you hire us.