Content wins rankings, but technical SEO decides whether Google can find, render and trust that content. This is the exact checklist I run before any site goes live — it takes about an hour and catches nearly every indexing problem I have ever seen in production.
Crawlability and indexing first
If Googlebot cannot crawl a page cleanly, nothing else matters. Verify the site in Google Search Console, submit the XML sitemap, and confirm the important pages are indexed — not sitting in “Discovered, currently not indexed”.
- Submit sitemap.xml and check index coverage in Search Console
- One canonical URL per page — no www/http/trailing-slash duplicates
- Redirect chains collapsed to a single hop; every 404 either fixed or given a proper 404 page
- robots.txt allows CSS/JS; noindex only on genuinely private pages (admin, API, thank-you)
Then performance and structure
Google's published Core Web Vitals thresholds are LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1. Images are usually the biggest lever: serve AVIF or WebP with explicit dimensions, lazy-load below-the-fold media, and defer third-party scripts so they never compete with the first paint.
Finally, add structured data where it earns rich results — Organization and BreadcrumbList sitewide, Article or Product plus FAQPage on eligible pages — and confirm every page has one H1, a unique title under 60 characters and a meta description under 160. I run this full flow on every development project before handover.
“Technical SEO is not a one-time task — re-run the checklist after every redesign, migration or CMS change.”
