A comprehensive technical SEO checklist for beginners
- Wisdom Ukpeh
- Sep 4
- 5 min read
Technical SEO is a step-by-step process. This guide provides a 7-step overview of the basics and offers a technical SEO checklist that you can reuse for every audit.
Inside:
Checklist #1: How do I improve my website security?
Website security is the bedrock of a technical SEO audit. Improving your website’s security benefits your business in the following ways:
Builds brand trustworthiness
Ranking on Google’s SERP.
Protects you from hackers.
Do this:
To secure your website, use Let’s Encrypt or Cloudflare SSL to enable HTTPS connections and get free TLS/SSL certification. Google prefers HTTPS over HTTP.
Fix mixed content errors with Why No Padlock or Chrome DevTools. Mixed content occurs when a secure page (HTTPS) loads any HTTP asset (image/script)
Add Content Security Policy and X-Content-Type-Options security headers to prevent content injection and XSS attacks. These attacks lead to the spread of misinformation and data theft.
Checklist #2: How do I make my website crawlable?
If your website isn’t crawlable, your delicate content doesn’t matter. Help crawlers by guiding them to important pages to index. Perform these audits:
Submit your XML sitemap to SEO plugins to auto-generate and update your sitemaps. Submitting a sitemap helps search engines discover new/updated pages faster.
Use the robots.txt tester on Google Search Console to block irrelevant pages on your site, such as admin sections and internal search results. This helps crawlers focus on the main page for indexing.
Checklist #3: How do I manage the crawl budget on my site?
For large sites, managing your crawl budget is vital. This involves guiding crawlers to index important pages on your site. To properly manage your crawl budget and boost your brand’s authority, do this:
Find and remove soft 404 pages in Google Search Console. Soft 404s show ‘not found’ content to visitors
Remove or link to orphan pages with Screaming Frog. These are pages that have no internal links to them
Shorten redirect chains with Ahrefs by linking to original content. Redirect chains happen when a page points to another URL, which then points to yet another. Always redirect the original URL straight to the final one.
Checklist #4: How do I monitor crawl errors and logs?
You should perform a log file analysis, especially if your site is large. This analysis helps you remove crawl waste or duplicate filters. You can go to the coverage report on Google Search Console or JetOctopus to perform this task.
For large e-commerce sites, guide crawlers on how to navigate pagination and faceted URLs. Misguidance in the area is a common mistake site owners make when performing a technical SEO audit. Let’s break down these terms.
What is pagination?
Pagination is the process of breaking content or product listings into multiple pages. Search engines may crawl deep pages less often, and users can miss content if links aren’t clear.
How to handle it:
Ensure each page has a unique title/meta.
Use internal links.
Avoid creating dozens of near-duplicate thin pages.
Stacy owns an e-commerce store with 120 women’s sneakers. Due to this large number of listed products, she broke down the list into multiple pages as follows:
Page 1: Items 1–40
Page 2: Items 41–80
Page 3: Items 81–120
To help Google crawl these pages, Stacy added ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ links, unique titles/meta for each page, and a breadcrumb trail (Home > Sneakers > Page 2). Most CMSs like WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopify handle this automatically
What are faceted URLs?
Faceted URLs emerge when URLs change based on filters, like name, size, or color. Each filter combination creates a new URL, which can result in duplicate URLs that drain crawl budget.
As a rule of thumb, keep indexable parameters that add value, e.g., category=boots. Canonicalize slight variations, e.g., size=10, and block trivial filters, e.g., sort=asc.
How to handle it:
Decide for each parameter: Should it be indexed, canonicalized, or blocked?
Use noindex for duplicate pages.
Add canonicals to the main page for minor variations.
Block truly useless parameters in robots.txt.
Checklist #5: How do I get my website indexed?
So far, you have secured your website to attract crawlers. Then, you guided them by managing the crawlers’ budget and pointing to relevant pages. Now, crawlers see your content as the best answer to a query in your niche.
Here’s how to ensure proper website indexing:
Set up your Google Search Console account to fix indexing errors.
Use canonical tags to indicate the preferred page (Yoast can add these automatically)
For international SEO, the hreflang tags testing tool helps you properly set up “hreflang” tags to tell Google which version to display in which country.
Validate schemas in the Rich Results Test, then monitor issues under “Enhancements” in Google Search Console.
Use the FAQ schema to earn rich results and support voice/AI answers. You can get FAQ ideas from AnswerThePublic
Checklist #6: How do I make my website mobile-friendly?
Smartphones make up 62% of internet traffic. In Google Search Console, use URL Inspection and Page Experience/Core Web Vitals to evaluate mobile rendering
You should also look out for the JavaScript framework your website uses.
Sometimes, crawlers may miss your content if they can’t render your JavaScript content, leading to improper indexing and page invisibility. Here’s how to amend:
Use the Wappalyzer Chrome extension to find out if your JavaScript framework is React, Angular, or Vue.
Use server-side rendering to render pages on the server before sending them to the browser. Next.js helps you execute this rendering.
Use dynamic rendering to serve pre-rendered HTML to crawlers while users see the JS version. Rendertron or Prerender.io helps you enable this rendering
NB: Use any of the rendering techniques to fix JavaScript issues
Verify rendering
Go to URL inspection on Google Search Console
Click on “View crawled page.”
Navigate to “screenshot” and “HTML.”
Confirm the screenshot isn’t empty
Confirm your HTML displays your main content
Checklist #7: How do I build a solid website structure?
Your website structure connects your technical SEO audit together. After crawling and indexing, your site structure uses keywords and links to position your content as an authority. A clean site structure makes it easy for humans and bots to interact with your website. Here’s how to strengthen your site structure.
Create an authoritative internal linking blueprint
Design your content plan as a system with interconnected parts. In other words, start with a content pillar and break the pillar into sub-content. This strategy makes your content an authority on a topic.
Use descriptive, keyword-rich URLs such as yourdomain.com/category/product rather than yourdomain.com/index.php?id=2345&sort=abc
Use schema.org to create breadcrumb markups for your site. Breadcrumbs make site navigation easy for humans and crawlers. You can also use Yoast SEO or Rank Math to enable schema-ready breadcrumbs automatically.
Amplify your website’s speed
The slower your site, the more you hurt your SEO investment. Thus, use Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report to measure speed. Then optimize for LCP (<2.5s), INP (<200ms), and CLS (<0.1).
These metrics ensure your site is responsive and loads quickly. Use field data tools such as Chrome UX Report to understand real user experience on LCP, INP, and CLS. Dashthis shared a comprehensive article section on improving these metrics.
Ongoing Audit
Improving your site’s technical SEO isn’t a one-time activity. You should continue auditing your website to provide an excellent experience for your visitors. While auditing, look out for crawling and indexing errors to improve your ranking.
To help you stay organized, I created this interactive technical SEO checklist on Notion for regular usage. Click the link to download it for free.
Questions for Wisdom? Share them in the comments.
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