Most SEO advice starts with keywords. We start with the plumbing. If search engines cannot crawl, render and index your pages cleanly, nothing else you do will compound — and you will spend months pushing content into a bucket with a hole in it.
Below is the audit we run on every new client site. It is ordered by impact: fix the things that block indexing first, then speed, then the signals that tip rankings in your favour. Work top to bottom and you will usually see movement within four to six weeks.
1. Crawlability and indexation
Before anything else, confirm that the pages you care about are actually eligible to appear in search.
- Submit a clean XML sitemap that contains only 200-status, canonical, indexable URLs.
- Check
robots.txtis not blocking CSS, JS or the sections you want indexed. - Find and remove noindex tags left behind by staging environments or SEO plugins.
- Kill orphan pages — anything with zero internal links pointing at it.
- Consolidate duplicate URLs (trailing slash, http/https, uppercase, UTM variants) with one canonical.
- Fix soft 404s and redirect chains longer than one hop.
- Review your log files or Search Console "Crawled – currently not indexed" report monthly.
2. Core Web Vitals and page speed
Speed is both a ranking signal and a conversion lever. Prioritise real-user data (CrUX) over lab scores.
- Target LCP under 2.5s — preload the hero image, inline critical CSS, drop render-blocking fonts.
- Hit INP under 200ms — break up long tasks, defer non-essential third-party scripts.
- Keep CLS under 0.1 — always size images, ads and embeds with explicit dimensions.
- Serve modern formats (WebP/AVIF) with responsive
srcset. - Cache aggressively: long-lived headers for static assets, a CDN in front of everything.
- Lazy-load below-the-fold media only — never the hero.
- Audit third-party tags; every tag manager plugin you forgot about is costing milliseconds.
Technical SEO is not a one-off project. It is the maintenance that keeps every future content and link investment paying interest.
3. Structured data
Schema markup is the cheapest way to win extra real estate in the results page.
- Organization + LocalBusiness on the home page, with logo, sameAs and contact points.
- BreadcrumbList on every inner page so results show a path, not a raw URL.
- Article / BlogPosting with author, datePublished and dateModified.
- FAQPage and HowTo where the content genuinely matches the intent.
- Product + Offer for e-commerce, including price and availability.
- Validate everything in the Rich Results Test and fix warnings, not just errors.
- Re-validate after every theme, plugin or CMS upgrade.
4. Internal linking and site architecture
Links pass authority and context. A flat, deliberate structure beats a deep maze every time.
- Keep important pages within three clicks of the home page.
- Use descriptive, varied anchor text — never "click here" on a money page.
- Build topic clusters: one pillar page, many supporting posts, all interlinked.
- Add related-post and breadcrumb modules so every page links sideways as well as up.
- Point legacy redirects at their final destination, not the home page.
- Audit your top 20 revenue pages quarterly and add contextual links into them.
5. Our 30-minute weekly routine
You do not need a huge tool stack to stay healthy. Every week we check five things:
- Search Console — coverage, Core Web Vitals, manual actions.
- New crawl (Screaming Frog or Sitebulb) compared against the previous one.
- Broken links and 404s hitting the server logs.
- Redirect chains added since the last check.
- Speed field data for the top ten landing pages.
That single habit catches 90% of technical regressions before they cost you rankings.
What to do next
Run the checklist against your own site this week. If the crawl comes back with more than a handful of critical issues, get them fixed before you brief another piece of content — the return on that work is almost always higher than one more blog post.