The 12-Point Technical SEO Checklist You Can Run Yourself

You don't need a paid crawler or a developer on retainer to find most of the technical problems holding your site back. The biggest issues - the ones that quietly keep pages out of search entirely - are usually visible in a browser, a free Google tool, and twenty minutes of attention. This is the checklist we run first on every site, written so a non-technical owner can work through it without jargon.

Go down the list in order. The early items are the ones that cap everything else: there's no point optimizing a page's title if search engines were never allowed to index it in the first place.

Crawlability and indexation (do these first)

1. Check that your pages are actually indexed

Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. The rough number of results is how many of your pages Google has stored. If it's far lower than the number of pages you've published, search engines are missing content - that's the single highest-impact thing to fix.

2. Read your robots.txt

Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Make sure it isn't accidentally blocking important sections with a Disallow rule. A single stray line here can hide your whole store or blog from crawlers.

3. Look for accidental "noindex" tags

In your browser, right-click a key page, choose "View page source," and search (Ctrl+F) for noindex. If it appears in a meta robots tag on a page you want ranked, that page is telling Google to stay away. This is one of the most common silent traffic killers.

4. Confirm you have a sitemap

Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. It should list your real, current URLs. Submit it once in Google Search Console so crawlers have a clean map of the site.

5. Check canonical tags

In page source, search for canonical. Each page's canonical URL should point to itself (or the intended primary version), not to the homepage or a wrong page. Mispointed canonicals quietly tell Google to ignore the page you're looking at.

Speed and mobile

6. Run PageSpeed Insights on your money pages

Paste your homepage and top product page into Google's free PageSpeed Insights. It scores your Core Web Vitals: LCP (how fast the main content loads), INP (how responsive the page feels), and CLS (how much the layout jumps while loading). Aim to clear the "good" thresholds on the pages that actually make you money first.

7. Compress your heaviest images

Images are the most common reason pages load slowly. Find the largest ones (PageSpeed flags them), resize them to the size they're actually displayed at, and save as WebP. This is often the single biggest speed win available, and it takes minutes.

8. Test the mobile view

Open your site on a phone, or resize your browser narrow. Google indexes the mobile version first, so check that text is readable without zooming, buttons aren't cramped, and nothing important is cut off. If the mobile experience is broken, that's the version Google is judging you on.

On-page and structure

9. Give every page a unique title and description

Each page needs one clear, specific title tag and meta description - no duplicates across the site, nothing truncated. These are what show in search results and they tell engines what the page is about. Duplicate titles across templates are a frequent, easy-to-fix problem.

10. One H1 per page

Each page should have a single, descriptive H1 heading that matches its purpose. Multiple H1s or a missing one muddies the signal about what the page is for.

11. Add structured data to key pages

Schema markup (Organization, Product, FAQ, Article) helps both search engines and AI assistants understand what your pages mean, and can unlock rich results. Use Google's Rich Results Test to check what you have. Missing or invalid schema makes you ambiguous to machines - and increasingly to the AI tools that now summarize the web. We cover that side in does technical SEO still matter for AI search.

12. Fix your internal links and orphan pages

Every important page should be reachable in a couple of clicks from the homepage and linked to from related pages. Pages with no internal links pointing to them ("orphans") rarely get crawled or ranked. A flat, well-linked structure beats a deep pile of buried pages every time.

When to get a full audit

This checklist surfaces the obvious, high-impact problems. A deeper audit is worth it when you have a larger site, you've cleared the basics and traffic still isn't moving, or you want a complete, severity-ranked inventory rather than a spot check. That's what A3E's Technical SEO Audit produces: a structured review of crawlability, indexation, speed signals, metadata, structured data, and mobile readiness, returned as a prioritized fix list with the quick wins called out separately. It's AI-assisted analysis delivered as a clear report - that's the product, and we report what we find, including where you're already in good shape. For a plain-English walk-through of what a full audit covers, see what a technical SEO audit actually checks and how to prioritize fixes.