Technical SEO Checklist 2025 | Complete Technical Audit Checklist

It’s tough to make your brand stand out nowadays. Search engines like Google are constantly changing. Now they favor fast, safe, and easy to use websites. Fixing technical areas of your website isn’t just a good idea; it’s a must. Having good technical SEO is the key to growing your site online.

This blog will show you the complete technical SEO checklist for this year. It will ensure that search engines can effortlessly crawl and index your website. Plus, they will give people a positive experience, which always brings them back to your brand.

Importance of Technical SEO

We all know that quality content and backlinks are crucial for SEO. But technical SEO is the core at which everything is built. So if your website is technically flawed, even exceptional content can fall behind. A technical SEO checklist offers benefits such as:

It allows search engines to crawl and index your website easily.
It provides the audience a safe, fast, and smooth user experience.
It ensures your website meets modern SEO standards to avoid penalties.

Technical SEO is vital to succeed online. Even the best efforts may fail without it. Make sure to fix this to avoid penalties and improve your search rankings.

Technical Site Audit Checklist

This section provides a detailed guide to check your website’s technicals. It includes key factors that affect your search engine rankings and the overall user experience.

1. Website Crawling and Indexing

Ensure your website is easy for search engines to crawl

Disallow pages that you don’t want to show.
Be careful not to block vital sections of your website.

Submit a valid XML Sitemap to search engines

Ensure it includes only those pages you want to index.
Submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

It avoids duplicate content issues on your website.
Add self-referencing canonical tags for special website pages.

(d)Check for problems in website crawling or indexing

Use Google Search Console to fix pages with 404s, server errors, and redirect loops.

2. Site Navigation and URL Structure

Make sure to use a logical site structure.

Make it so that people can visit any page in under three clicks.
Put your content in clear groups that are easy to navigate.

Make your website URLs easy to understand.

Try using short URLs with target keywords.
Avoid using long and confusing codes in your URLs.

Make sure that every part of your website is linked to the others.

3. Mobile Enhancements

Make sure your website works well on mobile devices.

Google offers a mobile usability test to check your site’s performance.
Avoid using tools like Flash that won’t work well with smartphones.

Ensure your website loads quickly on mobile devices.

Make sure your Largest Contentful Paint is less than 2.5 seconds.
Make sure your first Interaction to next Paint is less than 200 milliseconds.
Make sure your Cumulative Layout Shift is less than 0.1.

4. Website Speed and Performance

Run a comprehensive performance check.

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse to check your site’s performance.

Check loading speed of images on your website.

Use image types such as WebP for faster loading times.
Make image sizes as small as possible.
Only load images when they are about to appear on screen.

Try loading only vital codes for better loading times.
Shrink and combine code files to reduce server requests and improve loading speed.

(d) Make your site faster through caching and a CDN

Try improving your loading times, especially for users in different regions.

5. HTTPS and Website Security

Ensure your website’s security through HTTPS.

Every link on your website should have this protocol.
Ensure that your website’s content also includes HTTPs along with your website. It will help you avoid security warnings later on.

Have an SSL Security Certificate for your website.

It must be real and should be renewed regularly. It’s proof that your site is secure.
Check if this certificate is about to expire, along with browser security alerts.

Make sure to update all your website software regularly.
Use security headers for secure content management and threat prevention.

6. Structured Data and Schema Markup

Add more labels to your site’s data.

Use standard labels set for articles, products, reviews, and FAQs.

Check if it works using the Rich Results Test.

Fix errors you encountered in this test for enhanced SERP features.

Keep schema labels updated, especially for changes in reviews and events.

7. Internal Linking

Use explicit anchor texts on your website.

Use words while linking that clearly explain the destination page.

Organize links so essential pages get the most attention.

Your core website pages should have the most internal links from other pages.

Limit links per page so Google can learn its importance and focus on link strength.

8. Technical SEO for International Sites

Make sure to use hreflang tags carefully.

Tell search engines which language and region each page is targeted at.

Avoid Duplicate content on different website versions.

Edit the content for each region so Google doesn’t think it’s duplicate content.

It is crucial for sites with .com domains and a global audience.

9. Core Web Vitals

It ensures your website is intuitive and loads quickly. It determines whether your website provides a positive experience or not. Google prefers this metric while ranking sites.

Metric	Passing Score
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)	≤ 2.5 seconds
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)	≤ 200 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)	≤ 0.1

Remember that INP replaced FID as a key interactivity metric this year.

10. Website Monitoring and Maintenance

Use tools to check your SEO health.

Use tools such as Google Search Console and SEMrush to check your website.

Check your Website for Technical SEO.

Do this once every month if your website is big or complex.
Do this once every three months if your website is small or simple.

Follow Google Search Central or Search Engine Journal for fresh updates.

SEO Technical Audit Template

Our technical SEO checklist section will tell you about audit templates, which can notably affect your rankings and overall audience experience. It includes:

How easily can search engines crawl your website.
Which website pages are appearing on Google.
How compatible is your website with mobile phones.
How fast is your page loading speed on computers.
A complete list of security checks.
Have you used schema labels on your website.
How good is your website’s internal linking.
Your website’s performance is based on Core Web Vitals.
An issue tracker list with priorities and future steps.

Use tools including Google Sheets, Notion, or Airtable to create a comprehensive technical seo audit checklist.

Conclusion

Your website’s technical SEO isn’t just a single task. It’s something you must do forever till your website lasts. But you can use our technical audit checklist to fix your website. It helps your brand succeed in the long run. Whether you work for an agency or an internal marketing team, monitoring these aspects is key to staying ahead in the long run.

Our technical SEO checklist will not only help your website get noticed by Google but also help you deliver an exceptional experience to those who will use your site. When ranking on Google, a positive experience ranks you higher.

FAQs

Q1. What’s included in technical SEO?

Technical SEO includes website’s speed, indexing, intuitiveness, and security. It also involves fixing broken links and duplicate content so search engines can index your site.

Q2. How do you do technical SEO?

It involves improving site speed and intuitiveness and fixing crawl errors in your website. It also includes creating an XML sitemap and fixing internal links based on site structure.

Q3. How to do a technical SEO audit?

You can check crawlability, site speed, mobile usability, and HTTPS status. You can also fix your website’s broken links and XML sitemap for better performance.

Q4. What are the four types of SEO?

Four main types of SEO include on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO. Each aims to improve different aspects of your website to improve its rankings.