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This is a technical SEO checklist for business owners, written so you can hand it to a developer and sound like you know what you are talking about. Every item is a yes or no question. Every no is a fix that can help your rankings.

You do not need to do all of this yourself. You need to know what to ask for, and you need to be able to tell when the work is done.

Crawlability

  • Reachable: search engines can reach your site, with no robots.txt rule blocking important pages
  • Robots.txt: the important crawlers are allowed, including GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for AI visibility
  • No orphan pages: every page that should be indexed is reachable through a link on your site
  • XML sitemap: submitted in Google Search Console and referenced in robots.txt
  • Descriptive links: internal links use descriptive text, not click here
  • Content in the HTML: the site does not rely on JavaScript for critical content

Can search engines actually reach and read your pages?

Diagram showing how a crawler uses robots.txt and sitemap.xml to crawl a site and follow internal links

The checklist

Free website scan

Scan your site, then work the list

Start with the free scan, then work the checklist below. Your progress is saved, and you can hand the finished list to a developer.

  • To do
  • Done
  • Skip (doesn't apply)
Run a free scan on your own site
We fetch your site from the outside and report only what we measured. Nothing is installed, nothing is stored on your site.
Paste your full address, or just the domain. We start with your homepage.

We read your site's HTML as delivered, so anything added by JavaScript after the page loads is not visible to the scan.

  • Fetching your homepage...
  • Checking robots.txt and sitemap...
  • Reading page headers and tags...
  • Measuring page size...
  • Compiling your report...
Full report unlocked

Report unlocked. Each item below now shows our finding and your next step.

Guided checklist
Your checklist progress · 0%

0 done, 0 skipped, 30 to go

Your progress is saved in this browser.

Speed affects rankings and conversion.

Schema tells search engines what your content means, and feeds AI answer engines.

Google indexes mobile first, and more than half of traffic is mobile.

The boring stuff that keeps everything else working.

The checklist is not the finish line.

How to use this checklist

The items are grouped by discipline and ordered by priority: crawlability and indexation first, because nothing else matters if search engines cannot read your site.

Diagram showing three reasons technical SEO matters: crawlability first, speed to convert, and measuring the results

Why technical SEO matters

  • Crawlability first: nothing else matters if search engines cannot reach and read your site
  • Speed converts: slow sites rank worse and lose sales, especially on mobile
  • Measure after: once the checklist is done, the work is measured, not finished

Frequently Asked Questions

Quarterly for most sites, and after any major change: redesign, new platform, big content launch or migration. A one-off audit fixes the current problems. A recurring check stops new ones from building up.
Most of the fixes need at least some technical work, yes. Some are simple enough for a business owner with admin access, like resubmitting a sitemap or fixing a redirect. The value of this checklist is that you can tell a developer exactly what to fix and verify it was done.
Broken or missing measurement and indexation basics: no sitemap submitted, important pages blocked or noindexed by accident, and redirect chains. These are not glamorous, but they silently cap every other SEO effort.

Want to Know Which Checklist Items Are Costing You?

If you want to know which items on this checklist are costing you rankings, book a free 30-minute Strategy Session. I will look at your site against the list and tell you the highest-priority fixes. No pitch deck, no obligation.

Contact Me Today

Book a free 30-minute Strategy Session

Tell me a bit about your business and we can dial in a strategy that fits.

    Sagar Sethi, expert online marketing consultant providing innovative marketing strategies