A Technical SEO Checklist You Can Run Before You Hire Anyone

A useful technical SEO checklist covers seven areas: whether pages can be crawled, whether the right pages are indexed, whether content renders for search engines, how fast and stable the pages are, whether structured data is valid and honest, whether internal links connect the site, and whether redirects and migrations were handled safely. Each area has a free way to check it, and most sites find their real problems in the first two.

Work through the list in order. Crawl and index problems stop everything downstream, so a fast, beautifully marked-up page that is accidentally blocked earns nothing.

Open Search Console and read the indexing report before anything else. It lists pages Google found but did not index and gives reasons: blocked by robots.txt, noindex, duplicate without a chosen canonical, soft 404, or discovered but not yet crawled. Compare that list with the pages that earn you money; any important page in the excluded group is your first fix.

Then read robots.txt and your sitemap together. The sitemap should list canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs only. Robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing, so a blocked URL can still appear in results without a description, and a noindex tag on a page that robots.txt blocks will never be seen.

Use the URL Inspection tool to see the HTML Google rendered for a key page. If your headline, body copy or internal links are missing there, your framework is hiding them behind scripts or user actions, and you have found a high-value fix. Google documents JavaScript SEO basics, including using real links and avoiding fragments for routing.

For speed, rely on field data. Core Web Vitals in Search Console report what real visitors experienced for loading, interactivity and layout stability. Google says good Core Web Vitals align with what its core ranking systems seek to reward, alongside other page experience aspects. In our view relevance still comes first, so fix poor groups on important templates and do not chase a perfect lab score.

Rank each issue by two things: how many indexable, valuable pages it affects, and how cheap it is to fix. A sitewide noindex tag on a template beats a hundred missing alt attributes. Write the fix, the owner, the date and the expected effect in a log so later traffic changes can be tied to changes you made.

Re-crawl after each batch and check Search Console again in a few weeks. Google notes that some changes take effect in hours and others in months, so judge results over a window, not a day, and keep a record of anything else that changed in the same period.