← Technical SEO
Technical SEO Audit Checklist for 2026
By Scott Sutter · Easty Marketing Group · June 2026
Technical SEO is the foundation everything else is built on. Content and links won't move rankings if Google can't properly crawl, index, and understand your site. Run this checklist quarterly to catch issues before they limit your visibility.
Crawlability
No critical pages blocked in robots.txt
No important pages blocked with noindex tags
XML sitemap includes only canonical, indexable URLs
No orphan pages (pages with no internal links)
Crawl budget is not being wasted on low-value URLs
Indexation
All important pages are indexed in Google Search Console
No significant indexation errors or 'Discovered - currently not indexed' issues
No duplicate pages competing for the same keywords
Canonical tags are implemented correctly on all pages
Pagination is handled correctly (rel=next/prev or canonical to main)
Site Speed & Core Web Vitals
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5 seconds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200ms
Images are compressed and served in WebP format
JavaScript is minified and deferred where possible
On-Page Technical
Every page has a unique, descriptive title tag (50-60 chars)
Every page has a unique meta description (150-160 chars)
One H1 per page, with primary keyword included
Internal links use descriptive anchor text
No broken links (404 errors) on any indexed page
Redirects & URLs
All HTTP URLs redirect to HTTPS
No redirect chains (A→B→C should be A→C)
URL structure is clean and descriptive
Old URLs are 301 redirected (not 302) to new destinations
No redirect loops
Structured Data
LocalBusiness or Organization schema on homepage
Service schema on all service pages
Article schema on all blog posts
FAQ schema where FAQ content exists
BreadcrumbList schema on interior pages
Related Resources