A Technical SEO Checklist You Can Work Through in a Day
Technical SEO is mostly about removing obstacles rather than gaining advantages. Nothing here will make a mediocre page rank, but any one of these can stop a good page from ranking at all.
Confirm your pages can be found and indexed
Start in Search Console's indexing report. Pages that are not indexed cannot rank, and the reasons are usually mundane: a stray noindex tag, a robots.txt rule blocking a whole directory, a canonical pointing somewhere else, or pages orphaned with no internal links.
This single check catches more real problems than anything else on the list, and it is the one most often skipped.
Fix Core Web Vitals in the order they matter
Three metrics, and they are not equally difficult:
- Largest Contentful Paint — usually a hero image. Compress it, serve WebP, size it correctly, and preload it.
- Cumulative Layout Shift — set explicit width and height on images and reserve space for ads and embeds.
- Interaction to Next Paint — reduce JavaScript. Every third-party script runs on the main thread and competes with the user.
Test on a real mobile device
Indexing is mobile-first, so the mobile version of your page is the version being ranked. Desktop performance is close to irrelevant for SEO.
Check on an actual mid-range Android on mobile data. Look for text too small to read, tap targets too close together, content hidden behind interstitials, and anything that loads acceptably on Wi-Fi and collapses on 4G.
Add structured data where it earns something
Structured data does not improve rankings directly, but it can change how your result appears, which affects clicks.
Add the types that map to what you actually are: Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage, Product with price and availability on product pages, Article on posts, and Breadcrumb site-wide. Skip the rest — marking up things you are not invites manual action.
Use internal links deliberately
Internal linking is the most controllable ranking factor you have and the most neglected. It tells search engines which pages matter and passes authority to them.
Link from your strongest pages to the ones you want to rank, using descriptive anchor text rather than read more. Make sure no important page is more than three clicks from the homepage, and that every page has at least one internal link pointing at it.
Frequently asked
Does site speed really affect rankings?
Directly, it is a modest signal. Indirectly, it matters a great deal — slow pages lose visitors before they engage, and the behavioural consequences affect both rankings and every conversion metric you have.
Do I need an XML sitemap?
For a site under a few hundred pages with good internal linking, it adds little. For large sites, new sites with few external links, or sites with deep sections, it genuinely helps discovery. It costs nothing to have one.