The technical SEO checklist: 12 things to look at first
Technical SEO sounds complicated, but most problems live in the same handful of places. This is the list we start every audit with.
1. Indexing before anything else
Check the Pages report in Search Console: how many pages are indexed and what reasons are given for exclusions. If important pages are missing from the index, no other optimization matters.
2. Robots.txt and meta robots
A surprising number of sites block their own content by accident. Read robots.txt line by line and make sure no staging noindex tags survived the launch.
3. Canonical tags
Every page should point at itself unless there is a specific reason not to. Conflicting canonicals are the most common cause of the wrong page ranking.
4. Mobile page speed
Measure with real user data, not just a lab test. Most of the wins are in images, fonts and third-party scripts.
The remaining eight
Internal linking, structured data, hreflang, sitemaps, 404s, redirect chains, duplicate content and log file analysis. We cover these in detail during an audit — or ask us for the full list by email.
Want the complete list?
We will run a technical audit on your site where every point is checked and prioritised.