The Technical SEO Checklist That Actually Moves Rankings

Technical SEO is the foundation everything else sits on. Before you write a single blog post or build a single backlink, your site needs to be crawlable, fast and understandable to search engines.

1. Fix crawlability first Run a full crawl and look for redirect chains, orphan pages and pages blocked by robots.txt that should be indexed. Most sites I audit lose 20-40% of their crawl budget to junk URLs.

2. Core Web Vitals Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5s, Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Compress images, defer non-critical JavaScript and serve fonts locally.

3. Structured data Organization, LocalBusiness, Article and FAQ schema help search engines understand context and can win rich results.

4. Internal linking Your strongest pages should pass authority to the pages you want to rank. A flat, intentional internal linking structure often produces gains within weeks.