The technical SEO checklist I run on every site I build

Content decides what you can rank for. Technical SEO decides whether you are allowed to compete at all. Most of the sites I audit are not losing because their content is bad; they are losing because of a handful of silent technical problems. This is the checklist I run on every site I build or take over.

Crawling and indexing

• One canonical URL per page. www vs non-www, trailing slash vs none, http vs https: pick one of each and 301 the rest. Set rel=canonical on every page.
• XML sitemap listing only real, indexable pages, submitted in Search Console, updated when content changes.
• robots.txt that blocks nothing important. I regularly find sites blocking their own CSS, images, or entire sections by accident.
• No orphan pages. Every page you care about is reachable through internal links.

Core Web Vitals

• LCP under 2.5s on mobile. Usually a hero image problem: compress it, size it, preload it.
• CLS under 0.1. Give images width and height attributes, reserve space for embeds, never inject banners above content.
• INP under 200ms. Less JavaScript. Most small-business sites need a fraction of what their theme ships.

Metadata that earns the click

• Unique title tag under 60 characters per page, front-loaded with what the page is about.
• Meta description under 160 characters that reads like an answer, not a slogan.
• Open Graph and Twitter tags so shared links look intentional.
• One h1 per page that matches the search intent you want.

Structured data

At minimum: LocalBusiness or Organization sitewide, BreadcrumbList on inner pages, FAQPage where you genuinely answer questions, Article on posts. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test; broken schema is worse than none.

The silent killers

1. Staging sites left indexable, splitting your authority with a duplicate.
2. Redirect chains from years of replatforming, each hop leaking equity.
3. Soft 404s: empty category and search pages returning 200.
4. Renders only with JavaScript: if the content is not in the HTML, some crawlers never see it. Server-render or pre-render anything you want ranked.
5. Expired plugins rewriting titles or injecting duplicate meta tags without anyone noticing.

Prove it, do not guess

Search Console and a crawl (Screaming Frog or similar) once a quarter. Rankings move slowly; technical breakage shows up immediately if you are looking.

Every site in my portfolio went through this list before launch, which is a large part of why they rank. If you would rather not spend your weekends in Search Console, email me and I will audit your site and give it to you straight.