Technical SEO checklist: 12 fixes that move rankings

Great content cannot rank if search engines struggle to crawl or understand it. Technical SEO is the foundation everything else stands on — and it is usually where the quickest wins hide.

Crawling and indexing

• Submit a clean XML sitemap that lists only pages you want indexed.
• Check robots.txt is not blocking CSS, JavaScript or important sections.
• Fix redirect chains and point internal links straight at the final URL.
• Use canonical tags to consolidate duplicate and parameter URLs.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

• Serve images in modern formats at the size they are displayed.
• Remove render-blocking scripts and load third-party tags late.
• Reserve space for images and embeds to prevent layout shift.
• Cache pages and use a CDN close to your visitors.

Understanding and trust

• Add structured data for your organization, articles, FAQs and breadcrumbs.
• Give every page one clear H1 and a descriptive title tag.
• Build internal links from strong pages to the ones you want to rank.
• Make sure every page works — and reads well — on mobile.

Work through the list in order of impact, measure in Search Console, and repeat every quarter. See how we run SEO.