The Technical SEO Checklist We Run Before Every Engagement
Before strategy, before content, before links — these are the twelve technical checks that decide whether a site can rank at all, in the order we actually run them.
Every SEO engagement we take starts the same way: a technical pass that answers one question — can this site rank if everything else goes right? Content and links poured into a technically broken site is budget on fire. Here's the checklist, in the order we run it.
Indexation first
Is the site in the index at all? A
site:query and Search Console coverage report reveal more in five minutes than most audits do in fifty pages. Look for the gap between "pages you have" and "pages Google knows about" — both directions are problems.What's blocking what? robots.txt, meta robots, and X-Robots-Tag headers, checked against the pages that matter. The classic failure: a noindex left over from staging on a template that quietly propagates.
Canonical logic. Every page should declare one canonical URL, and internal links should agree with it. Parameter pages, trailing-slash variants, and http/https splits bleed authority when canonicals wobble.
Crawl efficiency
Log files, if we can get them. Real crawler behavior beats any simulation: what Google fetches, how often, and what share of its budget goes to pages that will never earn a visit.
Faceted navigation and infinite spaces. Ecommerce and listing sites generate URL spaces orders of magnitude larger than their real content. Contain them or they eat the crawl.
Redirect hygiene. Chains longer than one hop, redirect loops, and internal links pointing at redirects — small individually, corrosive at scale.
Rendering and performance
Does the content survive rendering? If key content or links exist only after client-side JavaScript runs, verify Google actually sees them. "It's in the DOM eventually" is not a strategy.
Core Web Vitals — in the field. Lab scores flatter; field data (CrUX) is what Google uses. LCP, INP, and CLS fixed at the code level, with a performance budget so they stay fixed.
Meaning
Structured data. Organization, product, article, FAQ — implemented per template, validated, and attribute-rich. This now pays twice: rich results in classic search, citation preference in AI answers.
Internal link architecture. Authority flows where links point. Money pages buried five clicks deep with two internal links will underperform regardless of content quality.
Duplication and cannibalization. Multiple pages targeting one intent split the vote. Consolidate or differentiate — deliberately.
International and mobile correctness. Hreflang that self-references and returns, and parity between mobile and desktop content — Google indexes the mobile version, full stop.
What we do with the results
Each finding gets three labels: impact, effort, and owner. Then it gets implemented — by us, in the codebase, which is the part most agencies skip. A finding without a deploy date is a decoration.
The first pass of this checklist is part of the free audit we run before any engagement. If your site has never had one, that's the place to start.