Technical SEO Audit Checklist

Confirm the page is indexed, under the URL you expect

Use Search Console's URL Inspection tool. A stray noindex or a misdirected canonical caps everything else at zero.

Never block a page in robots.txt if you also want a noindex tag on it read

Google can't see the noindex directive on a page it was never allowed to crawl.

Canonical tag, sitemap, and internal links all agree on one consistent URL form

Trailing slash, www/non-www, and parameter inconsistencies split ranking signal across duplicates.

No contradiction between a canonical target and that target's own indexing status

A canonical pointing at a noindexed URL is a contradiction Google may resolve by dropping both.

Diff the raw HTML source against what renders on screen

Content injected client-side after page load is sometimes indexed slower, or missed entirely.

Check Core Web Vitals against real-user field data, not just a lab score

A page can score well in a clean lab test and still fail in the field on real device and network conditions.

HTTP to HTTPS is a single 301 hop on the canonical host, with no chain and no 302

A redirect chain or a 302 leaves both versions crawlable and splits ranking signal.

No mixed content: every resource on an HTTPS page loads over HTTPS

Browsers block or downgrade HTTP resources loaded from an HTTPS page.

TLS certificate is valid, so not expired, self-signed, or broken-chain

Googlebot treats an untrusted certificate as a hard failure and will drop the page.

No stray X-Robots-Tag: noindex left over from a staging deploy

It lives in the HTTP response headers, so it's easy to miss. Nothing shows up in the page source.

Slugs are lowercase, hyphenated, stable, and free of dates or numeric IDs

Not a major ranking factor on its own. What costs you is changing a slug later.

Any URL change ships with a complete 301 redirect map, diffed old-vs-new before launch

The single most damaging URL mistake. Recovery from a missed redirect runs weeks to months.

Filter/sort/tracking parameter URLs canonicalize to a clean version by default

Unchecked parameter sprawl generates thousands of near-duplicate indexable pages.

Important pages are reachable within a few clicks of the homepage; nothing is orphaned

Pages deep in the click structure get crawled less often and pass less internal authority.

Title contains the page's primary phrase near the front, within ~60 characters display width

The strongest fully-controllable on-page relevance signal, and the one most likely to survive a Google rewrite.

Title matches the page's H1 and its search intent

A large title/H1 mismatch is a direct invitation for Google to rewrite the title.

Every page has a unique meta description, none duplicated site-wide

Google frequently rewrites descriptions anyway. But a blank or duplicated one is never used as written.

Structured data uses the specific schema.org type, not a generic fallback

Article/BlogPosting/Service instead of a bare WebPage or Thing. The specific type is what unlocks the rich results it supports.

JSON-LD content matches the visible page exactly, and passes Google's Rich Results Test

A valid JSON linter pass proves nothing here. The markup has to match what's visibly on the page.