Technical SEO Checklist
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21.05.25
If you work in or around digital marketing or SEO, you’ll no doubt have at some point heard the old adage “Content is King.” While this still holds true, great content alone is no longer enough to guarantee sustained organic visibility. Without strong technical foundations, even the most insightful articles and polished landing pages can fail to perform. Indeed, in SEO, if content is King, technical SEO is Queen.
While content SEO can often be a more familiar challenge for digital marketers to tackle, technical SEO presents a whole new, somewhat daunting challenge. So if you’re wondering where to begin with tech SEO Optimisation, here’s an updated, practical checklist to help you keep your site fast, crawlable, and future-ready.
Basic Tools & Setup
Before you start working your way through this checklist, there are a number of tools that we will be needing. With that in mind, if you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to get these set up (ideally a couple of weeks in advance) before you start your optimisation journey.
Set up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is essentially a dashboard overview which lets you understand how people are viewing and interacting with your website. It can let you see, for example, how much of your web traffic came from organic search vs PPC, direct, referral and/or social. You can see how many users converted, how much was spent, and much more.
While there’s not a huge amount of technical SEO information to be gleaned from its reports, setting up google analytics is the quintessential first step for any SEO project.
Set up Google Search Console
Where Google Analytics tells you how people interact with your website, Google Search Console provides crucial information about how people are finding your website in the first place. You can find which queries bring the most traffic to your site, which pages are being seen the most in Google searches, and much more.
Search console is also a key tool for tech SEO auditing, as its ‘URL Inspection’ tool, along with its page indexing, core web vitals and HTTPS reports will be referred to frequently in this guide. Plus, if you have already set up your Google Analytics, it only takes a couple of clicks to get your Search console account up and running.
Install Yoast SEO
This one is only for WordPress and Shopify users, but Yoast is a great free SEO tool, especially for creating Sitemaps. By linking Yoast to your site, you can automatically generate and maintain XML sitemaps, allowing all the important pages on your site to be crawled.
Download Screaming frog
Screaming Frog is an essential tool for technical SEO auditing, providing a comprehensive way to crawl and examine your website just like a search engine. This powerful software helps you identify a wide variety of potential issues such as broken links, server errors, duplicate content, and missing metadata.
Set Up a Keyword Tracking Tool
Similar to Google Analytics, keyword tracking tools such as ahrefs and semrush are not strictly necessary for a technical SEO audit (though they can provide some insights). However the benefit of having these set up is that they enable you to track your keyword movement before and after your tech SEO fixes, allowing you to see any improvements that come off the back of them.
Crawlability and Indexability
Now you’re all set-up, a natural next-step in any Technical SEO Checklist is whether the pages on your site are crawlable (able to be viewed by web crawlers) and indexable (able to be listed on search engine results pages). If either of these are unable to happen, it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll rank at all. Here’s a few things to check:
Check for and fix crawl errors in Google Search Console.
Crawl errors occur when a crawler is unable to reach a page on your website. Regularly scanning your site with audit tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console can help you spot these issues early. When reviewing crawl reports, there are a couple of key things to look for:
- Identify and fix 4xx/5xx errors (4xx errors usually mean something’s gone wrong on the user’s end like a broken link, a mistyped URL, or a browser issue. 5xx errors are the server’s fault).
- Redirect broken URLs properly
- Remove redirect chains and loop
- Confirm priority pages are indexable
Optimise Your Robots.txt File
Your robots.txt file is essentially a rulebook that tells crawlers which areas of the site they can and can’t access. It’s best to make sure no important pages are being blocked (you can do this through Google Search Console’s “indexing” report).
On the other hand there are some pages you might prefer not to be crawled (thank you pages, private/admin urls etc.). In this case, you can add in directives here to stop them from being crawled. By doing this, you can preserve your crawl budget for the important pages.
Submit and maintain an updated XML sitemap.
Your XML sitemap is a list of all important urls on your site, and is used by web crawlers to find and crawl these pages. For WordPress users, Yoast is a great free tool that can create and maintain XML sitemaps.
Once your sitemap has been created, be sure to submit it to Google Search Console for indexing. Sometimes search engines can miss pages if they’re not well linked from/to other pages on your site (see section IV. – Avoid orphaned pages).
Implement canonical tags
In some instances, you might have duplicate versions of urls. For example, an e-commerce website may have site.co.uk/shoes/black and site.co.uk/black-shoes. These pages will contain the same products, and target the same user intent. This can confuse search engines, as they are unsure which page to display in search rankings.
To combat this, canonical tags should be used to tell search engine crawlers which page to rank. This is implemented in a page’s < head > and in this instance would look like this:
< link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.site.co.uk/black-shoes” >
Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
Another core element of Tech SEO is how fast your site loads. A slow, clunky can not only impact your site’s position in search engine rankings, but it can also create a poor user experience. This, in turn can lead to a higher bounce rate, and lower conversions. Here are a few checks you can make:
Check (and improve) your Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of key performance metrics that Google uses to evaluate loading times, and how they relate to real-world user experience. As this is a Google tool, it plays an important role in how pages are ranked. Here’s a quick overview of the vitals, and what each one measures:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This tracks how long it takes for the largest visible element to load. For a good experience, aim for a LCP score of less than 2.5 seconds.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP): INP measures how quickly your site responds after a user interacts with it. A good INP score is anything under 200 milliseconds (0.2 seconds).
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures how stable the page layout is while loading. You know the feeling when you’re on a slow page and you go to click on something, but then the whole page shifts down and you end up clicking on something you didn’t mean to? That’s a bad CLS. Keeping CLS below 0.1 helps create a smoother experience.
You can monitor these Core Web Vitals inside Google Search Console under the “Experience” section, where you’ll find reports highlighting any URLs that may need improvement.
| Good | Okay | Poor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | <=2.5s | <=4s | >4s |
| INP | <=200ms | <=500ms | >500ms |
| CLS | <=0.1 | <=0.25 | >0.25 |
Compress and properly size media assets.
One of the main elements that contribute to your load speeds is your on-page media. Large, unoptimised images and videos can cause your LCP and CLS to suffer.
If you have large images impacting your LCP, there are a few tactics you can utilise. Compressing the files can reduce the images to a more manageable size, and next-gen image formats such as WebP & AVIF offer much greater compression than standard formats, while retaining the image quality.
Responsive Image techniques (such as the srcset attribute) can also allow browsers to select an ideal image size based on a user’s screen size and resolution.
You can also implement lazy loading to only load images when they enter the viewport, further improving load time. For more information on this, you can check out our blog: How to optimise images and video for faster website loading.
Mobile Optimisation
According to Statista, In 2025, mobile devices account for over 62% of all online traffic. Of course, Google is well aware of this, which is why they utilise “mobile first indexing“. In short, this means that Google primarily uses a site’s mobile version for indexing and ranking. With this in mind, building a mobile-friendly website is more crucial in 2025 than ever before.
Ensure full mobile usability
When it comes to mobile website design, there are generally two approaches: Responsive design, and Adaptive design.
A responsive web page is a single url, designed and built to change its layout depending on the type of device a user is viewing the page on. Images are resized, layouts are shifted, and content is displayed differently, to provide an optimal user experience for each individual user.
On the other hand, an adaptive design utilises multiple urls (e.g. site.com/blog & m.site.com/blog) to serve a completely different web page to users depending on their device.
While adaptive sites can boast faster load speeds, they also require more dev resources to build, and have more potential room for error, as alt-tags, canonicals and internal linking errors can throw a metaphorical spanner in the works.
Optimise for mobile interaction
There’s a big difference in how people interact with pages on mobile vs on desktop, and a surprising number of sites fail to optimise for this.
Mobile users are often on-the go, and surrounded by distractions, and as a result, they prioritise rapid information-gain and faster conversion paths. While desktop users tend to spend more time on pages, reading the minutiae and making a more measured decision.
While a text-image split section could be a nice addition to a desktop site, on mobile it could present a large scroll gap, causing some users to disengage. Similarly, small buttons designed for mouse clicks could be tricky for mobile users to tap on, causing frustration and high bounce rate. Be sure to test your page on as many devices as possible to get a feel for how real world users would interact with it.
Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Good site architecture is like giving your visitors (and search engines) a well-drawn map. When everything’s laid out clearly, it’s easy to find the right content, stay engaged, and move deeper into your site. Ensuring strong structure is an integral part of any Technical SEO strategy.
Maintain a clear, logical hierarchy
Think of designing your website like you’re building a house. You wouldn’t place the pantry and the fridge in opposite corners, you would want them both to be in the kitchen. It’s the same with your website. You want related content grouped logically, not scattered in random places. The easier it is for users and search engines to find what they’re looking for, the better your site will perform.
Use breadcrumb navigation
Just like Hansel and Gretel left breadcrumbs to find their way back through the forest, breadcrumb navigation helps users to easily backtrack through your site to find their way back to a more familiar area.
If you have an e-commerce site, this can greatly improve your CTR, as users who may not find the exact product they want, are given a single-click opportunity to view similar products.
Implement strategic internal linking to boost priority pages
To crawlers, internal links are like big red arrows pointing to a chosen page, telling them “Look here! This is important!”. With this in mind, make sure you are adding multiple internal links to the important pages on your site. The more links you have pointing to a page, the greater importance you are placing on it.
Avoid orphaned pages
In a similar vein, orphaned pages are pages on your site that have no internal links pointing to them at all. These pages are essentially cut off from the rest of your site, making it difficult for crawlers to find and index them. Audit tools such as screaming frog can identify orphan pages, allowing you to add links to to connect them up to the rest of your site. You can do this using the N-gram function.
Structured Data and Schema Markup
Schema markup is code you can add to your web pages to help search engines better understand your page, and the meaning and context of the content within it. This technical SEO optimisation opens your page up to greater SERP visibility through enhanced search features.
Add appropriate schema types (e.g., Article, Product, FAQ, Breadcrumb)
At the time of writing, there are 816 different Schema types, describing organisations, FAQs, events, places, people and more.
For example, you can add “Article” schema to blogs, “Product” schema to ecommerce listings, “FAQ” schema to common question pages, and “Breadcrumb” schema to support navigation.
Validate structured data using Google’s Rich Results Test
If you’ve already implemented schema, and want to check that it works, Google’s Rich Results Test allows you to input your URL and check if your structured data is working properly. If any warnings or errors appear, prioritise fixing them so your content remains eligible for enhanced search features.
Keep schema updated for new search features and AI interpretations
As with anything in SEO, structured data standards aren’t static. Search evolves rapidly, and new schema types/attributes become important. Keep an eye on updates from Schema.org and Google’s Search Central blog, and adjust your structured data to match emerging trends.
Security and HTTPS
Security is a non-negotiable part of technical SEO. A secure, HTTPS-encrypted site not only protects your users but also builds trust with search engines and improves your overall SERP rankings.
Ensure your SSL certificate is valid and automatically renewing
An SSL certificate encrypts the data exchanged between your users and your website, protecting sensitive information. Search engines favour secure sites, and visitors are more likely to trust a website that shows the secure padlock icon. Many hosting providers offer free SSL certificates with automatic renewal. If yours doesn’t, it’s worth setting a reminder to renew manually before it expires.
Enforce HTTPS across all pages
It’s not enough just to have HTTPS enabled you need to make sure every page on your site redirects properly from HTTP to HTTPS. Technical SEO audit tools such as Screaming frog or Google Search Console can highlight any links to HTTP urls, allowing you to fix any instances.
Keep all CMS, plugins, and dependencies up to date
Outdated CMS versions, plugins, and third-party libraries can open up vulnerabilities that compromise both security and performance. Make sure you’re running the latest stable versions, and remove any unused plugins or scripts that could create additional risk. If you have a good developer, bespoke API integrations can often be a faster, more secure alternative to stock plugins.
Accessibility and AI Search Readiness
Accessibility isn’t just about making your site readable to humans and screen readers, it also helps crawlers to understand your page too. Plus, an accessible site means a greater user experience, which can in turn improve your performance in search engine rankings.
Implement proper heading structure
Proper heading structure can help both readers and crawlers to understand your page. An ideal heading structure is sequentially ordered, starting with a single h1, followed by a h2, then, if needed, a h3, h4 and so on. This means that headings should not skip from a h2 to a h4 without a h3 in between.
An example of good page structure would be:
< h1 >
< h2 >
< h3 >
< h2 >
< h3 >
< h4 >
< h2 >
Ensure alt text on all images
Alt text is used to describe the content and function of images. This is essential for users who rely on screen readers, as it helps them to understand crucial context when reading a page. It also helps search engines to understand your visuals, improving your chances of appearing in image search results. Proper alt text should be descriptive, yet concise, and should add value to the page.
For example, for this image of a dog:
Good alt text: “Image of a small, white dog, running on short grass”
Bad alt text: “dog”
Utilise Hreflang Tags
If your website targets users in different countries, or who speak different languages, hreflang tags are essential. Hreflang tags help search engines to present the right version of your page to the right audience, improving both UX and SEO performance. Without proper hreflang implementation, you risk confusing crawlers and users with duplicate content across different regions. Make sure each page specifies its language and regional targeting, and regularly audit your hreflang setup to catch any missing or conflicting entries.
Optimise your site to leverage AI search traffic
Google isn’t going anywhere, at least any time soon. In fact, in 2025, Google estimated that they process over 5 Trillion searches per year, the highest it has ever been. That being said, there’s no doubt that LLM Search tools are getting more and more popular.
The good news, however, is that optimising for AI Search is, for the most part, the same as optimising for traditional Search Engines. Fast load speeds, helpful, well written content and proper page structure are key, along with the use of Schema and well-organised internal links.
Error Handling and Redirects (ongoing)
Ongoing maintenance is a core part of all areas of SEO, and Technical SEO is no different. By regularly keeping on top of errors and maintaining a clean redirect strategy, you can ensure that your site stays healthy, crawlable, and easy to navigate.
Audit and fix all 404 errors
404 errors occur when a user (or crawler) tries to access a page that doesn’t exist. This can happen for a number of reasons, from updated site structure, to sold out products or simple typos in internal links. While a few occasional 404s are natural, frequent broken pages can signal to search engines that your site isn’t being well-maintained. Tools like Screaming Frog can crawl your site to find any instances. Once you have a list of all 404s, you can start to fix them, either by restoring missing content or redirecting the broken URL to a working page.
Maintain a clean redirect strategy
When redirecting a page, there are two main types of redirect you can use: 301 (Permanent) and 302 (Temporary). Whenever you permanently move a page, use a 301 redirect to pass the majority of SEO value to the new URL.
You should also avoid stacking multiple redirects together (known as redirect chains), as these can slow down crawling and harm your organic performance. It’s good practice to regularly review your redirects, especially during site migrations.
Update broken links
Broken links can be frustrating for users, disrupting potential conversion journeys and causing visitors to abandon your site. They also damage your site’s crawlability, as crawlers hit a figurative dead end, instead of seamlessly travelling from page to page.
Regularly audit your site to identify broken links, and either update or remove them promptly.
Conclusion
Technical SEO might seem like a daunting discipline at first glance, but by breaking it down into clear, manageable steps, it becomes far more approachable. Strong technical foundations not only help your content perform better but future-proof your site against search engine algorithm updates and shifting search behaviours.
