Web6 min read
A technical SEO checklist for business websites
The technical foundations every business website needs to be found: crawlability, speed, structured data, internal links and more.
Content and links matter, but none of it helps if search engines cannot crawl, understand and quickly load your pages. This checklist covers the technical foundations we build into every website.
Make the site easy to crawl
- Publish an XML sitemap and reference it in robots.txt.
- Give every page one canonical URL and avoid duplicate versions.
- Use clean, readable URLs that describe the page.
- Return proper status codes: 200 for pages, 301 for moves, 404 for missing pages.
Help search engines understand each page
- One descriptive title and one meta description per page.
- A single h1 and a logical heading structure below it.
- Descriptive alt text on meaningful images.
- Structured data (JSON-LD) for your organization, services, articles, FAQs and breadcrumbs.
Be fast on real devices
Measure Core Web Vitals on real users, not only in lab tests. Serve modern image formats at the right size, load fonts efficiently, limit third-party scripts and avoid layout shifts by reserving space for images and embeds.
Make it work on mobile
Search engines index the mobile version of your site first. Check that content, links and structured data are the same on phones as on desktop, and that buttons are easy to tap.
Keep checking
Technical SEO is not a one-time task. Review Search Console reports monthly, fix crawl errors, and re-test performance after every major release.