A Technical SEO Checklist That Actually Changes Rankings

Technical audits often produce hundreds of findings, most of which change nothing. This checklist is ordered by how often each item turns out to be the real bottleneck.

1. Indexation: are the right pages in the index?

• Compare pages in your sitemap with pages actually indexed in Search Console
• Look for large numbers of 'Crawled – currently not indexed' URLs, usually a quality or duplication signal
• Check for accidental noindex tags and blocked resources in robots.txt
• Identify index bloat from filters, tags, search results and session parameters

2. Duplication and canonicalisation

One page should exist at one URL. Check http/https, www/non-www, trailing slash variants, uppercase URLs, and parameter versions. Self-referencing canonicals on every page, with deliberate exceptions.

3. Site architecture and internal links

Important pages should be reachable within three clicks and should receive internal links from relevant content. Orphan pages — indexable but unlinked — are surprisingly common after redesigns.

4. Core Web Vitals on real devices

• Use field data first; lab scores are diagnostic, not the target
• Largest Contentful Paint is usually an image, font or slow server response
• Layout shift usually comes from images without dimensions, injected banners or late-loading fonts
• Interaction delays usually come from heavy JavaScript on the main thread

5. Mobile parity

Indexing is mobile-first. If your mobile version hides content, uses different headings or loads different structured data, the desktop version is largely irrelevant to ranking.

6. Structured data that matches the page

Implement JSON-LD for what is genuinely on the page. FAQ markup requires visible FAQs. Product markup requires real prices and availability. Review markup for your own business, self-generated, is a policy violation.

7. Rendering

For JavaScript-heavy sites, check what search engines see after rendering. If the main content only appears after client-side hydration, consider server-side rendering or pre-rendering.

What to skip

Chasing a perfect score in a speed tool, fixing broken links on pages nobody visits, and rewriting every meta description on a 50,000-page site are all ways to look busy. Prioritise by traffic and revenue potential.