Technical SEO Checklist: Ensuring Your Website is Search Engine Friendly

SEO isn’t a simple strategy, but the effort you put in is worth its weight in gold-coated conversions. From brand visibility to higher-quality leads, it’s a top-tier marketing method that works just as well for small businesses as it does for large corporations. The secret to success? A comprehensive technical strategy that covers all your bases.   

With that in mind, we’ve put together this super handy technical SEO checklist. Get to grips with what’s needed for professional-level SEO and start climbing up the search engine result pages (SERPs). 

1. Prepare for Crawling and Indexing 

Crawling is the method that search engines use to understand your website. They’ll send out bots (sometimes referred to as crawlers or spiders) to analyse the content on your site and collect data on everything from links and images to keywords. After crawling, your website is indexed. This essentially means that Google has registered and logged your website and is getting ready to rank it. 

A key aspect of technical SEO is preparing your site for crawling and indexing. To ensure Google finds and understands all of your content, here’s what you need to do: 

• XML sitemap: Ensure your XML sitemap is well-structured and submitted to Google Search Console to ensure your website is crawled and indexed 
• Robots.txt file: Review your robots.txt file to make sure it isn’t blocking any pages from being crawled and indexed 
• Noindex and nofollow tags: Check your tags so that only pages you don’t want indexed are left out 
• Crawl errors: Identify issues like 404 and 5xx errors and resolve the issues 

2. Review Your Site Architecture 

Your site architecture is a blueprint of how your website pages connect and the overall hierarchical structure of your content. This is important for guiding search engines through your site, and is also crucial for user experience (UX). 

During web development, ensure that all important pages are easy to navigate to (we recommend 3 clicks or less). Use internal links strategically to highlight the authority of important pages so that search engines know which of your content to pay more attention to. Your services and pricing pages, for instance, should be consistently linked to from around your website if you want them to rank well in the SERPs.  

You can also improve your site architecture with topic clusters. These are groups of published content that link together to form a comprehensive look at an overarching subject or theme. Usually, topic clusters support a central pillar page, which highlights your expertise and should be the content that your technical SEO strategy points to. 

3. Schema Markup and Structured Data 

Structured data involves organising your content in ways that machines (like Google bots) can easily understand. Schema markup is a type of structured data, bringing more context to your content for search engines. 

While crawling can tell Google what’s on your site, schema explains what it means. Not only does this help your site rank for relevant queries, it also makes it more likely you’ll secure those in-demand, premium spots, like featured snippets and AI overviews, while enabling voice search. 
 

Review your site using Google’s Schema Markup Testing Tool. This’ll highlight any errors in your structured data so that you can quickly fix them for a foolproof technical SEO strategy. 

4. Optimise Your Load Speeds 

Google is pretty vocal about your page speeds. They’ve clarified, for instance, that when load speeds increase from 1 to 3 seconds, bounce rates (the number of users leaving your site before clicking on another page) also increase by 32%. As this is a key indicator of user dissatisfaction, Google won’t want to rank websites with either slow load speeds or high bounce rates. 

Your technical SEO checklist should include page speed optimisation. We recommend reviewing your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which will test your load speeds for both mobile and desktop, and give you plenty of detail regarding potential issues. Use this data to start optimising your content for quicker loading times and help both your SEO and UX. 

Struggling with a slow website despite optimisation? The issue might be your hosting. Explore options for SEO-friendly web hosting and support to push your site into Google’s limelight. 

Core Web Vitals 

Beyond speed, Google now also measures user experience through Core Web Vitals: 

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): loading performance 
• First Input Delay (FID): interactivity 
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): visual stability 

You’ll see these details when you carry out your PageSpeed test. Improving your performance ensures your pages not only rank well but also feel smoother to browse. 

5. Check Mobile Responsiveness 

Around 65% of all web traffic comes from mobile. Technically, this makes mobile the most important format to optimise for (though excellent SEO looks at optimisation across the board, for all formats), and Google is known to take mobile responsiveness into account when ranking websites. 

To test your site’s mobile responsiveness, access it on a mobile device to walk through your features and make sure everything’s working as it should. Pay attention to easy navigation and UX-focused layouts. If it’s not delivering a high-quality UX, it’s time to head back to development and optimise for responsiveness. 

6. HTTPS and Site Security 

Secure websites are a trust signal for search engines. They don’t want to be presenting unreliable, scam results to their users, so you need to prove that you’re a reliable source. We recommend: 

• Ensuring all web pages are encrypted with HTTPS 
• You have an SSL certificate (check your existing certificate is still active) 
• Identifying mixed content, where HTTP content is loaded on HTTPS pages 
• Adding security headers like Content-Security-Policy (CSP) and X-XSS-Protection 

These measures keep your users safer while browsing and ensure you aren’t flagged as an unsecured website, which can damage your SEO. 

7. Remove Broken Links and Duplicate Content 

Two major red flags for Google that can damage your SEO are: 

• Broken links: An inbound or outbound link that no longer works, leading to an error code. 
   
• Duplicate content: More than one version of your content is found throughout your website, or across different websites. Content is either identical or suspiciously similar. 

For effective SEO, make sure to remove all instances of broken links and duplicate content. Luckily, there are tons of online tools to highlight these issues on your website, like Dead Link Checker and Grammarly’s Plagiarism Checker.  

8. SEO-Friendly URLS 

Your URLs should be short and descriptive. The path or slug of your URL, which is the portion that follows your domain, needs to be relevant to the content on the page. If possible, use SEO keywords in your URLs, too, and improve both SEO and UX.  

It’s also important that you don’t have any redirect loops or chains. These occur when your URLs have too many redirects attached to them, which confuses crawlers and slows down your load speeds. 

You might also need to use canonical tags, which are essential if you have multiple URLs pointing to either the same or similar content across your website (super common with blogs). Tags help Google understand which URL you want to prioritise in the SERPs. 

Work With Technical SEO Experts 

A technical SEO checklist is all well and good, as long as you have both the knowledge and time to implement it. Not sure you’re ready to work through all of these tasks? No problem, we can help. 

Our technical SEO team can bring expert knowledge and a fleet of professional software to your strategy. Go beyond the DIY SEO approach for real, long-lasting visibility and a website that’s built to stand out. 

Find out more about our technical SEO services by getting in touch with our team today.