Checklist Technical SEO

Technical Health Optimisation Checklist

Ensures the crawl, index and speed foundations are sound before any content or authority work.

ID
SS-CL-003
Confidence
High · 85
Evidence
Established
Updated
2026-07-08

Overview

Ensures the crawl, index and speed foundations are sound before any content or authority work.

When to use this

Run before a growth push, after a migration, or whenever indexing and Core Web Vitals regress.

Crawl and index integrity

  • Confirm every important page returns HTTP 200 and is not blocked by robots.txt.
  • Check that canonical tags point to the intended indexable URL on every template.
  • Verify the XML sitemap lists only live, canonical, indexable URLs.
  • Resolve every redirect chain and broken internal link surfaced by the crawl.

Performance and rendering

  • Confirm Core Web Vitals pass on mobile for your top templates.
  • Verify critical content renders without requiring client-side JavaScript.
  • Check that images are compressed, sized and lazy-loaded below the fold.

Structured foundations

  • Validate that structured data is present and error-free on key page types.
  • Confirm hreflang and locale signals are correct for every market you serve.
  • Re-run the crawl after fixes and confirm the error count has fallen to zero.

Recommended next steps

    Apply the method Technical Audit Framework Framework See the wider capability Technical Health Optimisation Capability

Where this fits - and what's next

The SearchScore path from a problem you feel to visibility you can measure.

    Problem Spot the pattern Method Pick the framework Do it Follow the guide Check Run the checklist Score Interactive audit TrackSearchScore Tracker StartFree audit →