The Beginner’s Technical SEO Checklist (With Free Tools)

Technical SEO sounds intimidating, but for most small and medium sites it comes down to a handful of questions. Can search engines find your pages? Can they index them? Do the pages load well on a phone? Is the site structured clearly? This checklist walks through each area in plain English, using free tools you can start with today.

Your free toolkit

You can also run a quick first pass with our SEO audit tool and bookmark Google Search Central for official documentation.

1. Crawling: can search engines reach your pages?

• robots.txt exists (yoursite.com/robots.txt) and doesn’t block important pages or resources like CSS and JavaScript
• An XML sitemap exists, lists only pages you want indexed, and is submitted in Search Console
• Important pages are linked from other pages on the site (no orphan pages)
• No broken internal links (404s) in your crawl
• Redirects go directly to the final URL, without chains or loops

2. Indexing: are the right pages in Google?

1. Open the Pages report in Search Console. Look at indexed vs. not indexed and read the reasons given.
2. Check key pages with URL Inspection. Confirm your homepage, top service pages, and best content are indexed and that Google sees the right canonical.
3. Look for accidental noindex tags. A crawl will show any page with a noindex directive.
4. Handle duplicates. One URL per page: pick www or non-www, https only, and consistent trailing slashes. Use canonical tags where duplicates are unavoidable.
5. Prune or improve thin pages. Tag archives, empty category pages, and near-duplicate location pages can dilute quality. Improve, consolidate, or noindex them.

3. Speed and Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals measure real-world loading (Largest Contentful Paint), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console and test key templates in PageSpeed Insights.

• Images compressed, correctly sized, and served in modern formats (WebP or AVIF)
• Lazy loading for images below the fold, but not for the main hero image
• Caching enabled (most WordPress hosts or caching plugins handle this)
• Unused plugins, scripts, and heavy sliders removed
• Image and embed dimensions set to prevent layout shift

More on images in the image SEO guide.

4. Mobile-friendliness

Google primarily uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking. Open your key pages on an actual phone. Is text readable without zooming? Are buttons easy to tap? Is the same content available on mobile as on desktop? Hidden or stripped-down mobile content can cost you.

5. Site structure and on-page basics

Preview how titles and descriptions will look in results with the meta tag generator.

6. Structured data

Schema markup helps search engines and AI systems understand what a page is about: an organization, a local business, an article, a product, an event. It can make pages eligible for rich results, though Google never guarantees them. Start with Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage and Article on blog posts. Generate JSON-LD with the schema generator, validate with Google’s Rich Results Test, and check vocabulary at schema.org.

7. Security and housekeeping

• HTTPS everywhere, with http redirecting to https
• CMS, theme, and plugins up to date
• No manual actions or security issues in Search Console
• Custom 404 page that helps visitors find their way
• Regular backups in place

Let AI help you explain it

Finding issues is half the job. Explaining them clearly to clients or developers is the other half.

I ran a technical SEO check on [site] and found these issues:
[paste list of issues with counts and example URLs]

For each issue:
1. Explain in one sentence, for a non-technical business owner, why it matters.
2. Rate priority (high/medium/low) based on likely impact on indexing, user experience, or conversions.
3. Give step-by-step fix instructions for a [WordPress / Shopify / custom] site.
4. Say how to verify the fix worked.

Don't exaggerate impact. If an issue is minor, say so.

How to prioritize what you find

Your first crawl of a site will probably turn up dozens of warnings. Don’t panic, and don’t try to fix everything at once. Sort issues with three questions:

1. Does it stop important pages from being crawled or indexed? Blocked pages, accidental noindex tags, broken sitemaps, and wrong canonicals come first. Nothing else matters if Google can’t see the page.
2. Does it hurt real users? Broken links on key pages, very slow mobile loading, forms that don’t work, and pages that shift around while loading. These affect conversions as well as search.
3. Is it cosmetic at this scale? A few missing alt attributes on decorative images or slightly long title tags are worth fixing eventually, but they rarely move the needle on their own.

Fix the first group immediately, schedule the second group for the next few weeks, and batch the third into routine maintenance. When you report to a client, lead with what was fixed in the first two groups and why it mattered. That’s far more meaningful than “we fixed 214 issues.”

How often to run this

Run the full checklist when you onboard a client or launch a site, then do a lighter monthly check of Search Console reports and a quarterly crawl. Build the monthly check into your workflow; the AI SEO workflow for one-person agencies shows where it fits.