Table of Contents
Technical SEO covers the behind-the-scenes plumbing that determines whether Google can find, crawl, and index your pages at all — get this wrong and even great content won't rank, because it's never properly seen.
1. Check your robots.txt file
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and confirm it isn't accidentally blocking search engines from crawling your whole site — a stray "Disallow: /" left over from a staging setup is a surprisingly common cause of a site vanishing from search results.
2. Confirm your XML sitemap exists and is submitted
Check yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml loads correctly and lists your real pages, then confirm it's been submitted in Google Search Console under Sitemaps.
3. Look for indexing errors
In Search Console's Pages report, check for pages Google couldn't index and why — common causes include accidental "noindex" tags left on live pages or server errors blocking the crawler.
4. Check for duplicate or missing canonical tags
Each page should point to itself (or the preferred version) with a canonical tag, preventing Google from treating similar pages — like a page with and without a trailing slash — as duplicate content competing against each other.
5. Find and fix broken links
Broken internal or external links waste crawl budget and frustrate visitors — a free tool like Screaming Frog (in its limited free mode) or Search Console's Coverage report can surface these quickly.
6. Review your redirect chains
Old URLs that redirect through two or three hops before reaching the final page slow down both crawlers and visitors — check that redirects go directly to their final destination in a single step.
7. Test page speed and Core Web Vitals
Run key pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and review the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console — slow loading and layout shift both affect rankings and user experience.
8. Confirm HTTPS is enforced site-wide
Every page should load over https:// with no mixed-content warnings, and http:// requests should redirect cleanly to the secure version rather than loading in parallel.
9. Check mobile usability
Use Search Console's mobile usability report, or simply browse the site on an actual phone, to catch text that's too small, buttons placed too close together, or content wider than the screen.
10. Add structured data where it applies
Articles, products, FAQs, and reviews all have schema markup options that help Google display richer results — verify existing markup with Google's Rich Results Test tool.
Key takeaway: Technical SEO issues are often invisible to a regular visitor browsing the site normally — that's exactly why they go unnoticed for so long, and why running through this list periodically catches problems content alone never will.