The Technical SEO Audit Checklist We Run on Every Client Site

Most SEO agencies jump straight to keywords and content. We don't. If your site has crawlability issues, broken structured data, or poor Core Web Vitals, no amount of content will fix your rankings.

Technical SEO is the foundation. We audit it first, fix it first, then build content on a solid base.

Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. Our thresholds:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — under 2.5s. If your hero image takes 4 seconds, that's priority #1.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — under 200ms. Heavy JavaScript frameworks are the usual culprit.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — under 0.1. Set explicit dimensions on images and embeds.

We test on real devices over throttled connections, not just Lighthouse on a MacBook Pro.

If Google can't crawl it, it doesn't exist. Our crawlability checklist:

• Robots.txt reviewed — no accidental blocks on important paths
• XML sitemap submitted and validated — includes all indexable pages
• Canonical tags set correctly — no duplicate content signals
• Internal linking structure maps to site hierarchy
• Orphan pages identified and connected
• Redirect chains flattened to single hops

Structured data (JSON-LD) doesn't directly boost rankings, but it earns rich snippets that dramatically improve click-through rates. We implement:

• Organization schema on the homepage
• BreadcrumbList on every page
• Article schema on blog posts
• FAQ schema where applicable (but only for genuine FAQs)
• Product schema for e-commerce

We validate with Google's Rich Results Test, not just Schema.org validators.