How to do technical SEO

The order of work, and why

Technical problems stack. A page with a perfect schema block does nothing if robots.txt blocks it. A fast page is not stored if a stray noindex tag sits in the template. So start at the top of the chain and move down.

1. Crawl accessCan Googlebot fetch the page? Check robots.txt, server errors, login walls and firewall rules that block bots. Open the Crawl stats report in Search Console and look for 5xx responses and slow server response times.
2. IndexabilityShould the page be stored, and is it? Check noindex tags, canonical tags, and the Pages report. Decide which page types deserve to be in the index and which do not.
3. Redirects, status codes and duplicatesEach important page should have one address that answers 200. Old addresses should redirect once, in one hop, to the closest match. Remove redirect chains and soft 404s.
4. RenderingOpen a key page with JavaScript off and compare it with the live-test screenshot in URL Inspection. If the main text, links or prices exist only after a script runs, plan a fix.
5. Speed and page experienceMeasure Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift on the templates that earn traffic. Fix the template, not single pages.
6. Structured dataAdd schema types that match visible content: Organization, Article, Product, LocalBusiness or FAQ where the page truly has them. Validate and watch the enhancement reports.

A four-week plan for a site of a few hundred URLs

A larger site stretches each stage. A small brochure site may finish stage one and two in an afternoon. What does not change is the sequence.

A decision rule for what to fix first

Not every issue deserves a ticket. Score each finding on two questions: how many important URLs does it touch, and how directly does it stop a page from being crawled, stored or understood?

The rule: anything that blocks crawling or indexing of money pages goes first. Anything that only changes how a result looks goes last.

Tools you actually need

• Google Search Console: the only source that shows what Google itself saw. Pages, Crawl stats, Sitemaps and Core Web Vitals reports cover most of the work.
• A crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, to see the whole site the way a bot does.
• PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome DevTools Network tab for speed work.
• The Rich Results Test and Schema.org validator for structured data.
• Your server logs, if you can get them, for the truth about which URLs Googlebot requests.

Our technical SEO checklist turns the stages above into tickable items.

Pitfalls that waste a month

• Starting with page speed because a score is red, when the real issue is an indexing block.
• Fixing pages one at a time when the template is the cause.
• Chasing a perfect Lighthouse number. Field data from real visitors matters more than a lab score.
• Changing many things at once, so you cannot tell which change worked.
• Forgetting to retest. Every release can undo a fix, so recrawl after each deployment.
• Treating technical SEO as a one-off. Plugins, themes and content teams keep adding new problems.

If your site runs on a specific platform, platform quirks change the order. See Shopify SEO and WordPress SEO for the usual traps on each platform.