Technical SEO is unglamorous and disproportionately profitable. Before publishing another article, run these twenty checks. They are ordered roughly by the frequency with which we find them broken in GCC-market audits.

Crawlability and indexation

  1. Robots.txt blocks what it should not — and unblocks what it should. Check staging, search pages, and parameter URLs.
  2. XML sitemap reflects canonical URLs only; submit in Search Console and watch coverage errors weekly.
  3. Canonical tags are self-referencing or intentional; no page has two canonicals.
  4. No soft 404s: thin pages returning 200 dilute crawl budget and quality perception.
  5. Paginated and filtered states are handled — either canonicalized, noindexed, or deliberately indexable with unique value.

Site architecture

  1. Every indexable page is reachable within three clicks from the homepage.
  2. Internal links use descriptive anchors, not "click here" or bare URLs.
  3. One URL per intent — pick .html or directory style and enforce it sitewide with redirects.
  4. Orphan pages: run a crawl, find pages with zero internal links, fix or prune.
  5. Breadcrumbs implemented visibly and in BreadcrumbList schema.

Rendering and performance

  1. Core Web Vitals pass on mobile at the 75th percentile — check CrUX/PSI, not lab-only tools.
  2. LCP element is an optimized image or text block, not a slider or hero video.
  3. JavaScript-dependent content renders in Google's crawler — inspect the rendered HTML, not the source.
  4. Images lazy-loaded below the fold, preloaded above it, with width/height attributes.
  5. Fonts subset and font-display: swap; no layout shift from late-loading type.

Content hygiene at the template level

  1. One H1 per page template; headings are a hierarchy, not a styling system.
  2. Title tags unique and within limits; no templates generating "Page | Site | Site" duplicates.
  3. Meta descriptions unique per page or deliberately absent — never auto-duplicated across thousands of URLs.
  4. Image alt text meaningful; decorative images empty-alt.
  5. Structured data validates and matches visible content — no markup for content users cannot see.

Security and maintenance

  1. HTTPS everywhere, HSTS enabled, no mixed content.
  2. 404s return proper status; custom 404 page guides visitors back.
  3. Redirect chains under two hops; no redirect loops.
  4. Structured 404/410 for removed pages vs. soft deletion.
  5. Quarterly technical crawl scheduled — sites decay.

Most sites we audit fail six to ten of these. The fix order: indexation, then architecture, then performance, then hygiene. If you want this run properly, our SEO service starts with exactly this technical audit. Related: on-page checklist and Core Web Vitals.

How often should a technical audit run?

Quarterly for active sites, monthly for large e-commerce. Technical SEO decays silently with every template change and plugin update.

Which tool is enough?

None alone. Combine a crawler (Screaming Frog), Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights. Tools find symptoms; judgment diagnoses causes.

Get your technical foundation audited before scaling content. Start a project.