The technical SEO checklist we run before every launch

Technical SEO has a long tail of checks that feel productive and change nothing. These are the ones that reliably move something, in the order we run them.

Crawl and index first

Before anything else, establish what Google can reach and what it has chosen to keep. Check the index coverage report for pages excluded as "crawled, not indexed" — that category is usually a quality signal, not a technical one, and no amount of speed work fixes it.

Then verify robots.txt is not blocking assets, that canonical tags point where you think, and that your XML sitemap contains only indexable, canonical, 200-status URLs. A sitemap full of redirects and 404s teaches the crawler to trust it less.

Then the foundations

One H1 per page that matches search intent. Title tags under about 60 characters that lead with the term people search. Internal links from your strongest pages to the ones you want to rank — this is the most under-used lever in most audits.

Core Web Vitals, honestly

Largest Contentful Paint is the one that usually needs work, and the usual culprit is an unoptimised hero image or a render-blocking font. Cumulative Layout Shift is nearly always missing width and height attributes on images or an ad slot with no reserved space. Fix those two before touching JavaScript bundles.

Structured data that earns something

Add schema where it produces a visible result: Organization, Product with offers, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Article. Marking up everything else is effort without return.

What we deliberately skip

Keyword density, meta keywords, and chasing a perfect score in any audit tool. A site can score 100 and rank nowhere. Judge the work by index coverage, rankings for commercial terms, and the enquiries behind them.