Phase 1: Crawlability and Indexation status
Before worrying about keywords or backlinks, verify whether search bots can physically read your pages. Review these items in Google Search Console:
- Page Indexing Report: Identify pages flagged under "Discovered – currently not indexed" or "Crawled – currently not indexed". These point to thin content, duplicate pages, or poor internal linking equity.
- Robots.txt Configuration: Ensure your
robots.txtfile does not inadvertently containDisallow: /or block access to CSS/JS files needed for Google's rendering engine. - XML Sitemap: Verify your sitemap is submitted, clean of 404s or redirected URLs, and automatically updates when new pages are published.
The master technical SEO checklist
| Technical factor | Inspection tool | Optimal standard |
|---|---|---|
| HTTP Status Codes | Screaming Frog / GSC | Zero broken 404 links; clean 301 redirects |
| Canonical Tags | View Source / DevTools | Self-referencing canonical on every unique URL |
| Server-side Rendering / SSG | Curl / Google URL Inspection | Visible HTML in initial response without JS required |
| Core Web Vitals | PageSpeed Insights / CrUX | LCP ≤ 2.5s, INP ≤ 200ms, CLS ≤ 0.1 |
| Structured Data | Rich Results Test | Valid Schema.org JSON-LD with zero syntax errors |
| Mobile-Friendly Layout | Chrome DevTools (Viewport) | No horizontal overflow; tap targets ≥ 48px |
Auditing JavaScript apps and Single Page Applications
If your website is built on React, Vue, or Angular without static prerendering or Server-Side Rendering (SSR), search engine bots might only receive an empty <div id="root"></div> tag on the initial request.
While Googlebot executes JavaScript in a second pass, this "render queue" introduces delays of days or weeks and expends significant crawl budget. Other bots (Bing, social media scrapers, and AI answer engines) frequently skip client-side JS entirely.
Internal linking architecture and click depth
Every valuable page on your website should be reachable within three clicks from your home page.
Orphan pages (pages that exist on your server and sitemap but have zero internal links pointing to them from other pages) rarely accumulate search ranking equity. Use breadcrumbs, contextual in-content links, and structured category tags to distribute authority across your domain.
