Most technical SEO audits fail for the same reason: they produce a 90-page export and no priorities. The checklist below is ordered by impact. Work top to bottom and stop when you find the thing that is actually holding a site back.
1. Make sure the right pages can be crawled
Open robots.txt and confirm you are not blocking CSS, JavaScript or whole sections by accident. Then compare the URLs in your XML sitemap with the URLs that return a 200 status. A sitemap should only list pages you want indexed.
2. Check indexing, not just crawling
A crawled page is not necessarily an indexed page. Use the page indexing report in Google Search Console to group excluded URLs by reason. “Crawled, currently not indexed” on important pages is usually a quality or duplication signal, not a technical bug.
3. Fix status code problems
- Replace internal links that point to 301 or 404 URLs with the final destination.
- Collapse redirect chains to a single hop.
- Return a real 404 or 410 for removed pages instead of a “soft 404” that returns 200.
4. Settle canonicals and duplicates
Pick one version of each URL (protocol, www or non-www, trailing slash, parameters) and make canonical tags, redirects and internal links agree. Conflicting signals are the most common cause of the wrong URL ranking.
5. Review page experience
Check Core Web Vitals field data for your key templates, not just the homepage. Fix the slowest template first because it usually affects hundreds of URLs at once.
6. Audit internal linking and site depth
Important pages should be reachable within three clicks and linked from relevant content, not only from the footer. Orphan pages, which have no internal links, rarely perform.
7. Validate structured data
Only mark up what is visible on the page. Test Organization, Article, Product or FAQ markup with the Rich Results Test and fix errors before warnings.
8. Confirm mobile parity
Google indexes the mobile version. Make sure content, links and structured data on mobile match desktop.
Remaining checks
Finish with hreflang for multi-region sites, pagination and faceted navigation rules, log-file samples to see where Googlebot actually spends time, and security basics such as HTTPS everywhere.
The rule of thumb: fix anything that stops a page being crawled, indexed or understood first. Speed, markup and polish come after.