Technical SEO Checklist: 12 Items That Get Your Site Ready for Google

However good your content is, Google cannot crawl, understand or rank your site properly if the technical foundation is broken. Technical SEO makes your site readable for search engines. Run through these 12 items to catch the most common mistakes.

Crawling and indexing

1. Does robots.txt leave important pages open?

Open /robots.txt on your domain. Disallow rules should cover private areas such as the admin panel, never your service or product pages.

2. Is the sitemap up to date?

The sitemap tells Google which pages to crawl. It should only list pages that return 200 and that you want indexed, and it should be submitted in Google Search Console.

3. Do missing pages really return 404?

A page that says "not found" but returns status 200 is a soft 404, which Google treats as low quality. Missing pages must return a real 404.

4. Do canonical tags point to the right URL?

When the same content is reachable from several URLs, the canonical tag tells Google which one is the original. Every page should point to its own correct address.

On-page essentials

5. Does every page have a unique title and description?

Keep titles around 50–60 characters and meta descriptions around 150–160, unique per page. Avoid repeating the brand name twice in a title.

6. Is there exactly one H1 per page?

The H1 states the main topic. Use one per page and structure sub-sections with H2 and H3.

7. Is the content in the initial HTML?

On some modern sites, content loads with JavaScript after the page opens and the server HTML only says "Loading...". Google can run JavaScript, but such pages are often evaluated late or incompletely. Render key pages on the server.

8. Do images have alt text?

Alt text tells search engines and screen reader users what an image shows. Use meaningful file names too.

Speed and experience

9. Do pages load fast?

Check Core Web Vitals in Google PageSpeed Insights. Oversized images, unnecessary JavaScript and slow server responses are the usual causes; serving images as WebP or AVIF is often the quickest win.

10. Does the site work well on mobile?

Google evaluates the mobile version first. Check readable text, easy-to-tap buttons and no horizontal scrolling on real phones.

Security and multilingual sites

11. Is HTTPS enforced with a valid certificate?

All pages should load over HTTPS and HTTP should permanently (301) redirect to HTTPS. Make sure the certificate renews automatically.

12. Is hreflang correct on multilingual sites?

Hreflang tags should point to each language's real counterpart. Tags that point to missing pages or are not reciprocal are ignored, and untranslated copies in another language should not be indexed.

Conclusion

Most of these fixes pay off for a long time once done. Run our free SEO analysis to see technical gaps in one report, or explore our SEO packages.