Technical SEO Checklist
Crawling, indexing, Core Web Vitals and structured data — the technical foundation for top rankings, as an actionable step-by-step checklist.
What to expect from this whitepaper
This whitepaper delivers the 10 essential technical SEO checks that every website should pass. Each check is explained with concrete tools, examples and step-by-step instructions — ideal for developers and technical SEOs.
The 10 Technical Checks
- 1 Check your robots.txt — keep important directories crawlable, block only real crawler traps and point to your sitemap
- 2 Submit and maintain an XML sitemap — only indexable 200 URLs, no redirects or error pages
- 3 Keep HTTP status codes clean — 200 for valid pages and permanent moves consistently via 301 redirects instead of 302
- 4 Avoid soft 404s — serve a real 404/410 status for empty or non-existent pages instead of returning status 200
- 5 Control indexing deliberately — keep thin and duplicate content out of the index with noindex and steer crawl budget to relevant pages
- 6 Set canonical tags correctly — every page clearly points to its preferred URL to avoid duplicate-content signals
- 7 Optimise Core Web Vitals — keep LCP, CLS and INP in the green with compressed assets, WebP/AVIF images and lean JavaScript
- 8 Ensure mobile-first — responsive rendering and identical content on mobile and desktop, since Google indexes the mobile version
- 9 Add structured data — implement Schema.org markup for articles, products or FAQs and validate it with the Rich Results Test
- 10 Maintain hreflang annotations — link language and country versions cleanly so users find the right variant in search
28
Pages
Format
2026
Published
Who is this whitepaper for?
Webmasters, developers and SEO leads — anyone looking to lay the technical foundation for top rankings.
Download whitepaper for free
Technical SEO Checklist — Coming 2026
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