The technical SEO checklist that matters
Technical SEO audits routinely return four hundred issues. Perhaps eight of them change anything.
In order of impact: make sure pages can be crawled and indexed, that canonicals point where you intend, that the site is fast on a mid-range phone, that structured data matches the visible page, and that internal links connect related pages. Most other technical findings are noise.
The purpose of technical work is to remove reasons a search engine might not use your page. It is finite, it has an end, and past that end more technical work returns nothing.
Crawl and index
Can the important pages be reached, and are they actually indexed? Check the index coverage report, not the sitemap. A page in your sitemap and not in the index is telling you something: usually that it is thin, duplicated, or orphaned from internal links.
Canonicals
Every page should declare the URL you want indexed, and that URL should be the one in the sitemap and the one you link to internally. Mismatches between those three is the most common cause of pages quietly not ranking.
Speed, on a real phone
Test on a mid-range Android on mobile data, not on your laptop. Largest contentful paint is usually an image or a font. Interaction delay is usually third-party script. Both are fixable without a rebuild, and both matter more for conversion than for ranking.
Structured data that matches the page
Mark up what is visibly on the page and nothing else. Invented ratings and prices get manual actions, and the temptation is real because the rich result is attractive. Which markup is worth adding is covered in schema markup that earns results.
Internal linking
The cheapest ranking lever most sites ignore. Every new page should link to and from the pages it belongs with, so the cluster is reachable and the relationship is legible.
Safe to ignore
Most crawler warnings about meta keyword tags, minor heading order on decorative elements, trailing slash consistency once redirects are in place, and anything described as a score out of a hundred by a tool that is also selling you something.
Questions we get asked
How often should a technical SEO audit be run?
Once properly, then after any migration or template change. Technical work is finite; recurring monthly audits usually produce noise.
Do Core Web Vitals affect rankings?
Marginally, and they affect conversion considerably. Fix them for the second reason.
Start with a Growth Audit
Every Colleviate engagement begins with an outside-in read of your brand and its competitive cluster, before we recommend a single line of spend.
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