Technical SEO checklist: getting your website ready for Google

A technical SEO checklist covers the groundwork a website needs so that Google can find it, understand it correctly and load it quickly. The main headings are crawling and indexing, clean URLs and redirects, page titles and descriptions, speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data and internal linking. None of this replaces good content — but when it is missing, even the best content stays invisible in search.

Technical SEO is concerned not with what your content says, but with how it is delivered. Can a search engine reach your page? Does it recognise it as the right page? Can it show it to the visitor quickly and properly? The list below is the sequence of checks we run on every site we launch, and on every site whose maintenance we take over.

1. Crawling and indexing

Everything starts here. If Google cannot crawl a page, or chooses not to index it, no other improvement will have any effect.

Is your robots.txt file accidentally blocking important pages — or the CSS and JavaScript files those pages need in order to render?
Is the sitemap (sitemap.xml) up to date, and does it list only live pages you want indexed? Redirected or removed addresses should not remain in it.
Has a noindex tag been left on live pages from the testing phase? It is one of the mistakes we see most often at launch.
Is Google Search Console set up, and has the sitemap been submitted? The indexing report shows which pages are left out, and why.
After new pages go live, is an indexing request sent through Search Console — and is it checked a few days later that they really are in the index?

2. URLs, redirects and duplicate pages

When the same content opens at more than one address, the search engine decides for itself which to show — and it does not always pick the one you would.

Does the site open at a single address format? The http and https, www and non-www, and trailing-slash and no-slash versions should all point to one address with a permanent (301) redirect.
Does every page carry the correct canonical tag? Filtered, sorted or parameterised addresses should point to the main page.
Are broken links and pages returning 404 scanned for regularly? If an old address with value has been removed, it should redirect permanently to the closest current page.
Are addresses readable? Short, lower-case URLs with hyphen-separated words tell both visitors and search engines what a page is about.
If a page’s address has changed, has the old one been redirected and have internal links been updated? A change of address should never break incoming links from other sites.

3. Page-level tags

The first thing anyone sees in a search result is the page title and description. Both influence ranking and click-through rate.

Check	What to look for
Title	Unique on every page, roughly 60 characters or fewer, main topic first
Meta description	Around 155 characters explaining what the page offers
H1	One per page; headings then step down in order — H2, H3
Image alt text	A short description of the image that also serves accessibility
Language tags	On multilingual sites, each language version correctly points to the others (hreflang)

A clean heading hierarchy matters not only for SEO but for visitors using screen readers. Accessibility and technical SEO point the same way more often than not.

4. Speed, mobile and Core Web Vitals

Google assesses page experience with three measures known as Core Web Vitals:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long the largest piece of content takes to appear. Google’s “good” threshold is under 2.5 seconds.
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how quickly the page responds to a click or tap. Good is under 200 milliseconds.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much the content jumps around whilst loading. Good is under 0.1.

The problems we meet most often — and their fixes:

Oversized images. Photographs should be served in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, at sizes that suit the screen, with anything below the fold loaded later.
Heavy JavaScript. Unused plug-ins, embedded tracking scripts and chat widgets slow the first load. Every plug-in should earn its place.
Font weight. Load only the font weights you actually use, not a whole family.
Elements without fixed dimensions. If images and ad slots have no size defined in advance, the page shifts as it loads.

Mobile is not a separate check — it is the main one. Google evaluates a site primarily by its mobile version, so menus, buttons and forms must be comfortable to use with a thumb.

5. Structured data

Structured data tells a search engine, in a machine-readable form, what a page is: this is a person, this is an organisation, this is a service, this is an article, these are frequently asked questions. It is written to the Schema.org standard and, used properly, opens the door to richer search results.

What we pay attention to:

Structured data must say the same thing as the content visible on the page. Marking up a review score or a question that is not on the page breaks the rules.
Organisation or person details — name, address, contact, social profiles — should be consistent across the whole site.
Breadcrumb markup tells the search engine where the page sits within the site.
After every change, the markup should be validated with Google’s Rich Results Test.

Structured data also helps AI-assisted search understand your pages correctly. We cover that in a separate article on visibility in AI search (GEO).

6. Site architecture and internal links

Pages that are technically flawless but not linked to one another look like a scattered archive to a search engine. In a good architecture:

Every important page is reachable within three clicks of the main menu.
No page is left orphaned — each one is linked from at least one other page.
Link text describes the destination. Rather than “click here” or “read more”, use descriptive phrases such as “symptoms of a panic attack”.
Topics are organised into clusters: a comprehensive main page, detailed supporting pages and links running both ways between them.

A concrete example is the psychologist website we designed for Gülşah Yalçın. Each area of practice has its own page, shaped around its own search intent, and articles, glossary entries and FAQs link back to those pages. Structured data for the person and the website, a clean sitemap and fast-loading pages work quietly underneath. All 85 pages are in the sitemap, and Lighthouse scores accessibility, best practices and SEO at 100.

7. The short checklist

What we look at before launch, or on day one of maintaining a site we have taken over:

robots.txt does not block important pages.
The sitemap is current and submitted to Search Console.
No forgotten noindex tags on live pages.
The site resolves to a single address format via permanent redirects.
Canonical tags point to the right page.
No broken links or needless 404s.
Every page has a unique title and description.
The heading hierarchy is sound and images have alt text.
Core Web Vitals sit within “good” thresholds on mobile.
Structured data validates without errors.
No orphaned pages; important pages are within three clicks.
Search Console warnings are followed up regularly.

Google’s own guide covers these topics in more depth: the Google Search Central SEO Starter Guide.

Frequently asked questions

Is technical SEO a one-off job?

No. New pages are added, plug-ins are updated, addresses change, and Google revises its rules and measures. That is why we treat technical SEO as part of regular maintenance rather than a single task.

Will fixing technical SEO raise our rankings?

Technical problems stop your site from appearing where it deserves to; removing them removes that obstacle. But rankings depend on many factors, including content, competition and the site’s credibility. We do not guarantee rankings, and we report everything we measure.

When will we see results?

The effect of technical fixes usually starts to show within a few weeks, because Google needs time to recrawl the pages. Content work pays off over months.

Do you review sites built by another agency?

Yes. We crawl the site first and report the findings in order of priority, writing plainly what each fix is expected to gain. Only then do we take over its care.

If you would like to review your site’s technical health together, see our SEO and maintenance service or get in touch. In the first review, we show you where the biggest gains lie.