Technical SEO: A 20-Point Checklist You Can Run Yourself
Technical SEO requires neither special tools nor large budgets. Most of the problems that genuinely cost rankings are visible to the naked eye within a couple of hours. Below are twenty points you can check yourself, with what to look at and what counts as normal.
Indexing: can search engines see you at all
| # | What to check | How | Normal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The site is not blocked from indexing | Open site.com/robots.txt | No Disallow: / line |
| 2 | No noindex in page code | Search the source for noindex | Absent on pages that matter |
| 3 | Number of indexed pages | Search Console, Pages report | Roughly equals the real page count |
| 4 | A sitemap exists and is current | site.com/sitemap.xml | Opens, dates are recent |
| 5 | The sitemap is submitted | Search Console, Sitemaps section | Success status, no errors |
Point 1 looks too obvious to matter, yet it is the cause of the most dramatic traffic collapses after migrations and redesigns.
URLs and structure
| # | What to check | How | Normal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | One version of the site | Open with and without www, http and https | Everything lands on one address |
| 7 | Canonical points to itself | Search the source for canonical | Matches the page address |
| 8 | URLs are Latin and readable | Look at the browser bar | No encoded characters or random digits |
| 9 | No redirect chains | Test old addresses | One hop to the final page |
Content and markup
| # | What to check | How | Normal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Titles are unique | Search Console or view source | One per page, under 60 characters |
| 11 | Descriptions are filled in | Same | Unique, under 160 characters |
| 12 | One h1 per page | Search the source for h1 | Exactly one, carrying the topic |
| 13 | Heading hierarchy has no gaps | Review the h1-h3 sequence | Levels are not skipped |
| 14 | Images have alt text | Search the source for alt= | Present and meaningful |
Point 12 is broken most often on homepages: the design replaces a text heading with an image, and the page is left with no primary signal about its topic.
Speed and mobile
| # | What to check | How | Normal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | Core Web Vitals from field data | Search Console, Core Web Vitals | Most URLs in the green zone |
| 16 | The site works on a phone | Open it on a real device | Text readable without zooming |
| 17 | Images in modern formats | Check extensions and weight | WebP, under 300 KB per photo |
Links and navigation
| # | What to check | How | Normal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 18 | No broken links | The 404 report in Search Console | Empty or nearly empty |
| 19 | Every page is reachable from navigation | Walk the menu | No pages without inbound links |
| 20 | The 404 page is useful | Open a non-existent address | Returns 404, has menu and search |
How to use this list
Order matters. Points 1-5 come first: if the site is blocked from indexing, the other nineteen are pointless. Then 6-9, because URL errors create duplicates that devalue any work on content.
A realistic schedule: the first pass takes two or three hours. After that, quarterly runs through the same list take twenty minutes, because you already know where to look.
What is deliberately missing and why
There is no keyword density here, no text length, no backlink counts. Not because those do not matter, but because they are no longer the technical layer: they require decisions about substance rather than a check of state.
Technical SEO does not bring traffic. It removes the obstacles that stop traffic arriving despite decent content. The distinction matters: if all twenty points are in order and there are still no enquiries, the problem is definitely not here, and you should be looking at whether the right people are arriving and whether they understand what you offer.
