Hermes Marketing Resource
Free Technical SEO Checklist
Use this checklist to find technical barriers before investing in more content or links. It separates crawl, indexation, architecture, performance, structured data, analytics, and conversion issues into a reviewable sequence.
Audit order
Confirm discoverability before optimizing presentation.
A perfect title cannot help a page that is blocked, duplicated, orphaned, incorrectly canonicalized, or excluded from the index.
Technical checks
Ten areas to review.
Use verified production data. Never place credentials, customer records, private URLs, security codes, or personal information in a public audit document.
Crawl access
- Robots directives
- HTTP status codes
- Internal discovery
- JS rendering dependencies
Indexation
- Indexable owner pages
- Noindex usage
- Soft 404s
- Selected canonicals
Canonical ownership
- One intent owner
- Duplicate parameters
- HTTP/HTTPS consistency
- Host and trailing-slash rules
Sitemaps
- Only canonical URLs
- Accurate lastmod
- No redirects or errors
- Submitted property matches host
Redirects and migrations
- Direct 301 mappings
- No chains or loops
- Legacy equity preserved
- Internal links updated
Architecture
- Important pages reachable
- Clear hubs and clusters
- No orphan pages
- Natural anchor context
Performance and mobile
- Core Web Vitals
- Render-blocking assets
- Responsive forms
- Layout stability
Structured data
- Matches visible content
- Correct entity references
- No invented reviews
- Valid breadcrumbs and FAQs
Security and trust
- HTTPS and mixed content
- Public legal pages
- Evidence boundaries
- No exposed secrets
Measurement
- GA4 ownership
- Search Console verification
- CTA and handoff events
- Qualified-lead reporting
Prioritization
Fix blockers before enhancements.
Start with accidental deindexation, wrong canonicals, broken redirects, 5xx errors, inaccessible navigation, or missing conversion paths. Then improve speed, schema, snippets, and supporting content.
Important pages cannot be crawled, rendered, indexed, or reached.
Wrong owner, redirect, canonical, or measurement prevents reliable growth.
Performance, structured data, or internal linking limits quality.
No confirmed defect yet; collect evidence before changing architecture.
Frequently asked questions
Technical SEO review questions.
What does a technical SEO audit check?
A technical SEO audit reviews whether search engines can discover, crawl, render, understand, index, and correctly attribute the important pages of a website.
Does passing this checklist guarantee rankings?
No. Technical readiness removes avoidable barriers, but rankings also depend on search intent, content quality, authority, competition, user experience, and search-engine decisions.
Should every URL be indexed?
No. Duplicate, filtered, private, staging, internal-search, expired, or low-value URLs may need consolidation, redirects, canonicalization, or noindex treatment.
When should an SEO specialist review the site?
Review is especially useful before a redesign or migration, after a traffic decline, when index coverage is unclear, or when important pages are not receiving relevant impressions.
SEO review
Turn the checklist into a structured SEO request.
The existing intake prepares a local preview before explicit email handoff. Submitted websites, problems, access status, budgets, and messages are not added to analytics.