The Only Technical SEO Checklist You’ll Need for 2025

Picture this. 

Imagine that your website is a gorgeous storefront stocked to the brim with products that consumers can’t wait to buy. 

However, your store is down a dark and dangerous alley, the door jams whenever anyone tries to enter, and the lights flicker inside – making it even more difficult for patrons to shop (if they even make it in to begin with). 

This analogy perfectly describes what it’s like to have poor technical SEO on your website. 

Even if you have an incredible website with high-quality products, certain technical factors can ruin your user experience, not to mention hamper your performance on search engines like Google. 

Things like slow site speed, a lack of mobile optimization (mobile devices account for 63% of all organic searches), and duplicate content will ruin your rankings and frustrate users, which is why you need flawless technical SEO to yield the best results. 

As further proof, 40% of users will outright abandon your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Since only 33% of websites are able to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test (its loading speed test), technical SEO is a major issue for the majority of site owners. 

In this article, we’ll provide you with the ultimate technical SEO checklist for 2025. With it, you’ll be able to perform a complete technical audit on your website, so stay tuned! 

­ Item #1: Improve Core Web Vitals Metrics (Site Speed Optimization) 

First up on the list is to ensure your Core Web Vitals metrics are up to snuff. Google runs its Core Web Vitals test on every website in its index, and as mentioned in the intro, less than half of all websites actually pass. 

Yet, a passing grade is essential for achieving top 3 rankings, which is why it’s important to improve each metric associated with the test. 

Rather than just measuring how fast a page loads, the Core Web Vitals test also measures visual stability and responsiveness. 

This is because web pages should not only load quickly but also remain stable and respond to user commands at the drop of a hat. 

Besides better SEO, improving site speed has the added benefit of improving your user experience. After all, ranking high won’t mean much if no one can stand navigating your website for more than three seconds, so this is a necessary step no matter how you cut it. 

The 3 metrics the Core Web Vitals test measures include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This is Google’s general loading performance metric, as it measures how long it takes for a website’s content to become fully visible to users. The reason it’s called longest contentful paint is because it specifically measures how long it takes to render the largest piece of content on the page, such as a large block of text, image, or video. Google recommends an LCP score of 2.5 seconds or faster. 

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This is the responsiveness metric, and it deals with how long it takes a website to respond to a user’s command. An example would be how long it takes for a drop-down menu to appear after a user clicks on the carrot icon to display it. A passing score is an INP of less than 200 milliseconds. 

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Lastly, CLS measures the visual stability of a website. A layout shift occurs whenever an image or ad renders slower than the rest of the page, causing the entire layout to shift down. This is often abrupt and disruptive to users, which is why it’s best to avoid layout shifts if at all possible. A CLS of less than 0.1 is what you need to pass the test. 

Now that you know more about each metric, let’s dive deeper and explore the best ways to improve them all. 

Improving your LCP score 

Let’s start with LCP, which is Google’s way of measuring your overall loading speed. So far, it’s the best metric in use that measures general loading speed, as it’s been challenging to find an adequate metric in the past. 

Here are a few ways you can boost your LCP score if it’s faster than 2.5 seconds:

• Optimize server response times. If you’re using a web hosting service with slow server response times, it won’t matter how much you optimize your website, it will still load slowly. Ensure that you’re using a hosting service that has fast server response times, such as SiteGround (average server response time of 0.552) and Digital Ocean (average server response time of 0.651). It’s also a good idea to implement a CDN (content delivery network) like CloudFlare to reduce latency. 

• Defer JavaScript. Determine which JavaScript commands are absolutely essential for rendering the main content of your website. You should defer all the commands that aren’t essential to load after the main content is fully rendered. This ensures that non-essential JavaScript commands won’t negatively impact your LCP score.  

• Optimize images and videos. Lastly, it’s remarkably easy for images and videos to slow things down due to their sizes. That’s why it’s a best practice to compress every image and video on your website. The good news is it’s entirely possible to compress giant images and videos without experiencing any loss in quality. Handbrake is a fantastic choice for videos, and TinyPNG works great for images. 

Ways to boost your INP score 

Next, let’s tackle INP, which is all about responsiveness. This metric occurs after the main content of your page has already been fully rendered, so it doesn’t have anything to do with the initial loading time. 

Instead, INP measures how quickly your website responds to user commands, such as clicking play on a video. If you’re struggling with your INP score, here are some ways to give it a boost:

• Minimize JavaScript execution time. As you’ll see on this list, JavaScript is one of the most common culprits for slowing things down, and it’s no different for responsiveness. In particular, long tasks make it hard for your website to respond quickly enough. Therefore, you should break up long JavaScript tasks wherever possible. You should also aim to minimize the amount of JavaScript executed on the page, which a JavaScript minifier like Toptal can help with.  

• Use web workers to run scripts on separate threads. A great way to speed things up is to offload heavy tasks to web workers, which are scripts that run in the background on a separate thread. Since this thread is independent of the main thread (your website), you’re able to complete all sorts of tasks without slowing down the performance of your site. Here’s more information on how they work and how to use them. 

• Reduce third-party code. Third-party scripts, like social sharing buttons, analytics trackers, and embedded videos, have the potential to slow down your website. While they can definitely be useful and enhance your user experience, use them sparingly. 

Improving your CLS score 

Lastly, you don’t want the layout of your website constantly shifting around, as that’s highly disorienting and frustrating to users. 

An example would be trying to click an Okay button but accidentally hitting the Cancel button due to an abrupt layout shift (probably caused by an ad that loads late). 

Here are some ways you can improve your CLS score:

• Be careful with the fonts that you use. Web fonts are notorious for loading late and causing layout shifts. In your CSS, you need to adjust the font-display property. Whenever it’s set to block (font-display:block), the browser renders the text invisible until the custom font loads, which can cause layout shifts. Setting it to swap (font-display:swap) will render a fallback font until the custom font loads, which will prevent layout shifts. 

• Avoid inserting content above existing content. You should also be careful whenever you add new dynamic content. Ensure that it doesn’t push existing content down, as this can cause a layout shift. 

• Include size attributes on all your images and videos. Every image and video element needs to have accurate height and width attributes. This ensures that the browser will reserve the space necessary to render them without a layout shift occurring. 

How to monitor your website’s loading speed 

Now that you know how to improve your Core Web Vitals metrics, how can you check to see that your optimizations actually worked?

There are quite a few ways to check your website’s loading speed metrics, the most accurate of which is PageSpeed Insights since it’s straight from Google itself. 

It will provide your LCP, INP, and CLS scores so that you can judge the effectiveness of your techniques. For example, if you don’t see any improvement to your LCP score after compressing your images and videos, it’s a sign that they weren’t the culprit – so you should look elsewhere (like your JavaScript). 

Also, here are some general tips for improving your website’s overall loading speed:

• Reduce the number of redirects. A redirect tells a web browser to visit and load a different URL since the original location is either A) moved or B) deleted permanently. However, it’s possible to use more than one redirect for a single URL. This is known as a redirect chain and it can slow things down, especially if there are multiple redirects involved. You can use this free tool to check any URL for redirects. 

• Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. We’ve already discussed using a minifier for your JavaScript, but you can also do the same for your CSS and HTML code. 

• Use browser caching. Browser caches are mini file databases that contain web page resources like images, videos, and code (JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc.). Caches help speed up your site because browsers can instantly access files on a cache instead of having to load them from scratch. Here’s a guide for using browser caching to speed up your website. 

Item #2: Optimize Your Site for Crawling and Indexing 

Once you’re able to ace the Core Web Vitals test, it’s time to optimize your site for better crawling and indexing. 

Search engines use bots to crawl the web to discover relevant pages to store in its index (its collection of pages to display in search results). 

Crawling your website involves analyzing your content for keywords and other factors to determine if it’s worth indexing for specific search queries. 

However, numerous factors can impede the crawling and indexing process. 

For instance, if search engine bots (like Googlebot) aren’t able to discover your most important SEO pages (like your landing pages), they won’t appear in the index, meaning they won’t show up in search results at all. 

That’s why it’s imperative to discover any crawling and indexing errors and resolve them as quickly as possible. 

Here are some effective ways to:

1. Identify crawling and indexing errors
2. Prevent them from occurring in the first place 

Let’s dive in! 

Identifying crawling and indexing errors using Google Search Console 

There’s one tool you should use above all others to discover your indexing errors, and it’s Google Search Console (GSC). 

The #1 reason why you should use this tool is it’s officially from Google, and it lets you view real indexing errors that are occurring on your site right now. 

GSC is an invaluable SEO tool for many reasons, and its Page Indexing Report is one of the strongest reasons why. It shows the indexing status of all the URLs on your website that Google currently knows about. 

That means it’s extremely easy to find out if a crucial page for SEO isn’t getting indexed, as it won’t appear on this report. That will tell you that something is wrong, which you can confirm by scrolling down to the Why Pages Aren’t Indexed section, but more on that in a bit. 

Also, you need to keep track of which pages you want to be indexed and which you do not. 

There are some types of web pages that have no reason to be on search engines, as getting them to rank would add no value to your business. An example would be a login page used to access the members area of your forum. 

Generating traffic to this page will not drive revenue or boost brand awareness, so it should receive a noindex tag (which lets bots know not to index the page). 

Since crawling websites takes energy and resources, Google designates a crawl budget for every website, which is based on crawl limit (how many pages Google can crawl without causing issues) and crawl demand (how often Google wants to crawl a site). 

Extremely popular websites like Amazon and Wikipedia receive the largest crawl budgets, while tinier, lesser-known websites receive smaller budgets, so bear that in mind when determining which pages are most important to index (i.e., your money pages like content, product pages, and landing pages). 

If you haven’t set up Google Search Console yet, check out our guide on the topic. 

The most common indexing errors 

Now, let’s take a look at the Why Pages Aren’t Indexed section of the Page Indexing Report. This section will notify you of all the indexing errors Google found on your website, and it looks like this:

As you can see, Google provides a detailed reason why certain pages weren’t indexed, such as 4xx errors (like 404 Not Found), duplicate pages, and noindex tags. 

Common errors you’ll run into include:

• 5xx errors (server errors). If you see an error that starts with a 5, it means there’s an error on the server side. Examples include 500 (Internal Server Error), 501 (Not Implemented), and 502 (Bad Gateway). Ways to resolve server errors include reducing excessive page loading by limiting dynamic content, checking that your site’s hosting server isn’t down, and using a properly formatted robots.txt file to better control your indexing. 

• Redirect errors. Redirects can cause indexing errors due to a number of reasons. Examples include redirect loops (where one redirect directs to a previous redirect) and redirect chains (where there’s an excessive amount of redirects). Redirected URLs that exceed the maximum number of characters can also cause errors, as can including a bad or empty URL in a redirect chain. 

• URL blocked by robots.txt file. Your robots.txt file specifies which pages you want Google to index and which you want it to ignore. If you accidentally included a page that you DID want indexed on your robots.txt file, it won’t appear in Google’s index. Ensure that you aren’t including important SEO pages in your robots.txt file to avoid this mistake. 

• URL marked ‘noindex.’ Noindex HTML attributes are another way to let search engine bots know that you don’t want a page to be indexed. As mentioned previously, it doesn’t make sense to index every single page on your website, as you’ll likely have lots of pages that will provide no value by being ranked on search engines. Yet, just like with robots.txt, there are times when you may accidentally include a noindex tag on pages that you want indexed. All you have to do to fix this problem is remove the noindex tag, and you’ll be all set. 

• Soft 404s. A soft 404 occurs whenever a page is empty but still returns a 200 OK HTTP response code to search bots. This means the page contains no content (or reiterates existing content) for users (and may even contain a ‘page not found error message’), but search engines continue to crawl and index the page. The ‘soft 404’ status is Google’s way of telling you that they suspect the page is empty and should not be indexed. If the content truly is gone, you should add a hard 404 Not Found. If the content is somewhere else, a 301 redirect will suffice. 

• Blocked due to unauthorized request (401). 4xx errors mean browsers aren’t able to access web pages for a variety of reasons. The 401 error means the browser cannot access the resource because it’s blocked by an authorization request that it cannot complete. To fix this, you can either remove the authorization requirements, or you can verify Googlebot’s identity to let it access your pages. 

• 404 Not Found. This is the most common type of 4xx error, and it means that the web page is no longer contained at the current address Googlebot has. It could be that the resource is permanently or temporarily gone. If the content is somewhere else, you should use a 301 redirect. If the page is only temporarily down and will be restored later (due to server issues or maintenance), you should use a 302 redirect, as it won’t be permanent. 

• Blocked due to access forbidden (403). This 4xx error means there are credentials required to access the web page. Googlebot never provides credentials, which means this is an accidental error on your server’s behalf. To resolve this issue, you should admit users who aren’t signed in to access your web pages. The other option is to explicitly allow Googlebot to access web pages without authentication, although you should verify its identity first (see the guide linked previously). 

• Crawled but not indexed. This means that Googlebot successfully crawled the page, but was not able to index it. Whenever this happens, there’s no need to resubmit the URL for crawling. Google may or may not index the page in the future. This is bad news if the page in question is one that you want to rank well and generate traffic. If you see this error for important content, it’s a sign that Google doesn’t feel your content is up to par with its quality standards. Ensure that the content is helpful, well-written, and embodies Google’s E-E-A-T acronym. Also, Google views content with less than 1,000 words as being too thin, which may cause it to not get indexed. 

• Discovered but not crawled. In this scenario, Googlebot was able to discover the page but wasn’t able to crawl it. This is most commonly due to an exceeded crawl budget. Most of the time, Google wants to crawl the page, but doing so may overload the site, so they reschedule the crawl. This error usually resolves on its own once Google is able to recrawl the website but keep an eye on it. 

You should make a habit of checking the Page Indexing Report to ensure that crucial SEO pages are getting crawled and indexed. 

Create and submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console 

Whenever Googlebot crawls a website, it isn’t able to snap its fingers and instantly know what’s on every single page. 

Instead, it begins the process with a seed, which is a list of known URLs. 

From there, the crawler uses internal links to discover other URLs on your website to crawl next. If there’s no internal link to a page you want to be crawled and indexed, Googlebot will likely miss it. 

While it’s always a good idea to add an internal link on every page of your website (to avoid orphan pages), mistakes can always happen. 

That’s why it’s a best practice to create an XML sitemap, which is a file containing a list of all the URLs on your website. 

The best part?

In formatting your XML sitemap, you’ll be able to convey which pages you need indexed the most to Googlebot and other search engine crawlers. 

In particular, you will be able to include:

• Each page’s level of importance in comparison to other pages 
• How often each page gets updated (Googlebot will crawl pages that are updated frequently first) 
• The last time you updated a page 

This is extremely valuable because it lets search bots distinguish your most important pages from pages that aren’t as crucial to your SEO. 

There’s a multitude of tools that will generate XML sitemaps for you, including Screaming Frog. There’s also Yoast and XML-Sitemaps.com if you use WordPress. 

We also have a detailed guide breaking down how to build a sitemap from scratch, including how to properly format it. 

Once your sitemap is ready, you need to submit it through Google Search Console. This submits the sitemap straight to Googlebot. 

Log in to your GSC account and navigate to the Sitemaps section. 

From there, enter your sitemap’s URL in the ‘Add a new sitemap’ section, and then click on the Submit button. 

In this same section, you’ll be able to monitor your submitted sitemaps to ensure everything runs smoothly. You should see the word ‘Success’ under status once your sitemap was successfully submitted and processed. 

Optimize your robots.txt file 

Your robots.txt file is how you let search engine bots know which web pages they can and can’t access for crawling and indexing on your website. 

It’s crucial to know that robots.txt is NOT the best way to keep a file or web page off Google. If you don’t want a web page to appear on Google at all, then you’re better off using a noindex tag (more on these in a bit). 

Instead, the main use of the robots.txt file is to avoid overloading your website with too many requests. It’s also an effective way to get the most out of your crawl budget. 

Also, not all search engines and bots will obey the instructions found in your robots.txt file, especially malicious bots – so it doesn’t really provide any security. 

Yet, optimizing your robots.txt file is still an SEO best practice because it lets crawlers know which pages aren’t worth indexing. 

This guide from Google contains detailed instructions on how to create a robots.txt file if you don’t have one already. 

Leverage noindex tags 

As mentioned before, noindex tags are the best way to keep a resource off of Google. The noindex attribute tells search engines not to crawl and index certain pages. 

However, this only works on search engines that support the noindex rule. Google and most major search engines do obey this rule, so it shouldn’t be an issue for most SEO campaigns. Noindex tags can either be set with <meta> tags or HTTP response header. 

Most of the time, <meta> HTML tags will suffice. However, if you’re trying to noindex a non-HTML resource like a video, PDF, or image – you’ll need to use an HTTP response header. 

Here’s an example of what both look like:

Noindex HTML tag: Insert this into the head section of the page: 

<meta name= “robots” content= “noindex”>

This will prevent all search engines that support the noindex rule from crawling and indexing the page. If you only want to prohibit Googlebot from crawling the page, you can use this tag instead:

<meta name= “googlebot” content= “noindex”>

HTTP response header: Use this X-Robots-Tag:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK 

(…)

X-Robots-Tag: noindex

(…) 

If you use WordPress, you have the option to add noindex tags without manipulating any lines of code. That’s because WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO let you add noindex tags straight from their interface. 

With Yoast, all you have to do is access the Yoast SEO meta box and navigate to the Advanced section. 

From there, there’ll be a section that asks if you want to allow search engines to show the web page in search results. 

To automatically implement a noindex tag, select No from the drop-down menu:

This is a great option for site owners who don’t want to edit their website’s code for fear of messing something up. 

Item #3: Optimize Your Site Structure and Navigation 

Site architecture and URL structure are massive components of technical SEO, as they affect both search engines and users. 

In particular, your website needs to implement a logical architecture where it’s easy for both search bots and users to navigate to any page they want with ease. 

If your site architecture is too complex, crawler bots may become confused and miss crucial pages that you need to be indexed. Users may also become frustrated and abandon your site if they aren’t able to quickly find what they need. 

However, with an airtight site structure, users will have a great experience, and search engine bots will be able to find what they need. 

Here’s a look at some of the best ways to improve your site’s architecture and navigation. 

Set up an organized URL structure 

Your URLs play a large part in the crawling process, as crawler bots will use your internal links to discover new pages on your website. 

Therefore, if your URLs are a giant mess, crawlers may become confused when navigating your internal links, causing them to miss integral pages for your SEO. 

If you use a concise, consistent URL structure, crawlers will have a much easier time discovering relevant pages on your website to index. 

As a bonus, logical URLs are easy for users to remember, meaning they’ll have an easier time navigating your site, too (and may even memorize some of your URLs for easy access). 

Here’s an example of a poorly formatted URL for SEO:

www.yoursite.com/d/104T85BtUBoLPsqbeGWPQKCqawxw6eJBq3noioC35S3M/edit?tab=t.0

This URL is way too long and contains nonsensical letters and numbers. 

Now, here’s a URL that’s properly formatted for SEO:

www.yoursite.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-tying-shoes

As you can see, the URL is much shorter, and it contains a clear description of the page in question. Just looking at the URL, we can tell that we’re on the site’s blog viewing a post that’s teaching us how to tie our shoes. 

Also, consistency is key when it comes to URLs, so you should format every URL on your website the same way. 

Best practices for naming your URLs include the following:

1. Use hyphens to separate words instead of underscores. This is because not every search engine recognizes underscores as word separators, but they all recognize hyphens. 
2. Keep your URLs as short as possible. 
3. Include relevant SEO keywords in URL titles to appeal to users and search engines (although URL keywords are mainly a ranking factor on Bing instead of Google). 
4. Maintain a consistent naming structure for all URLs. 
5. Always use lowercase letters in your URLs. 

Pro tip: Whenever you make a change to an existing URL, remember to place a redirect on the old URL, or you’ll wind up with a broken link. A change as small as correcting a typo still warrants a redirect, so make a note every time you change anything to a URL.

Use breadcrumb navigation 

Some websites are vast in scope and contain thousands of inner pages. Venturing into a site this deep can quickly become confusing unless you leave yourself a trail of breadcrumbs so that you can retrace your steps. 

That’s the idea behind breadcrumb navigation, which incorporates a series of internal links at the top of web pages that:

1. Remind users where they are on the site
2. Provides links back to all the previous pages they visited 

Breadcrumbs are enormously helpful to users on larger websites like e-commerce stores. As such, many websites incorporate breadcrumbs, like NASA, for instance. 

Whenever you navigate past the homepage, you’ll see a series of links at the top that look like this:

These are breadcrumb links. As you can see, there are links back to NASA News and the homepage. This provides a handy resource for users who are eager to return to previous pages but aren’t quite sure how to get back. 

Since crawlers mimic users reading your website, breadcrumb links help them out, too. 

Essentially, anything that makes it easier for users to navigate your website will have the added effect of also benefiting crawler bots. 

Since indexing is necessary to even rank at all, improving the indexing process is always good for your SEO. 

How to implement breadcrumbs on your website 

Now that you know why breadcrumbs are worth adding to your website, let’s learn how to do it. 

Methods will vary depending on the type of CMS you use and if you have a custom-built website. 

Sites built on WordPress will have the easiest time, as plugins like Yoast can easily add breadcrumbs without having to manipulate any code. Other CMS platforms similar to WordPress will also have plugin options. 

For custom-built websites, you’ll have to code in the breadcrumbs yourself, which we’ll explore shortly. 

Here are some WordPress apps you can use to add breadcrumbs to your site:

1. AIOSEO (All-In-One SEO) 
2. Yoast SEO 
3. BreadcrumbNavXT
4. WooCommerce Breadcrumbs 

Whichever plugin you choose, you’ll have to configure the settings to match your website’s structure, which is usually pretty simple. Plugins like Yoast also give you the option to select the anchor text you want to use for your breadcrumbs (such as Home, Blog, Services, etc.). 

If your website is custom-built, things become a bit trickier. 

First, you’ll need an intimate understanding of your website’s structure and hierarchy (i.e., how your pages relate to one another). A sitemap comes in handy for this step. 

After that, you’ll need to use a programming language like PHP or JavaScript to code the breadcrumbs into your site. This article breaks down how to code breadcrumbs using the React JavaScript library. 

Once you’ve written the code, use CSS to style the breadcrumbs the way you want them. Breadcrumbs that are too large can be distracting, while tiny breadcrumbs are easy to miss – so aim for a balance between the two. 

The final step is to place the breadcrumb code into your website’s template files to ensure they appear on every page. Also, don’t forget to test them out to confirm that they work. 

Choosing the right type of breadcrumbs to use 

There are a few different types of breadcrumb styles, and they each have specific uses. For instance, a breadcrumb can be location-based, attribute-based, or path-based. 

Here’s a quick explanation of each type:

• Location-based breadcrumbs. The most common type of breadcrumbs is location-based, which is what the NASA example was from before. These breadcrumbs list the name of each web page, and they provide a clear path back to the homepage. An example would be Home > Blog > How To Blog Post.

• Attribute-based breadcrumbs. Instead of providing a path based on location, these breadcrumbs use attributes, like the different sizes and colors of a product. For this reason, they’re most common on E-commerce websites. An example would be Jackets > Men’s Jackets > XL > Beige. 

• Path-based breadcrumbs show the unique path a user took to arrive at their current page. However, this type of breadcrumbs is antiquated since the ‘Back’ button on web browsers performs the same function. That’s why most SEOs choose either location-based or attribute-based breadcrumbs. 

Unless you run an E-commerce store, stick with location-based breadcrumbs, as they provide the strongest benefits to users and search engine bots. 

Item #4: Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly 

Ever since 2017, Google has used mobile-first indexing, which means they will crawl and index the mobile version of your site first. This was in response to the majority of web searches being conducted on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. 

58.67% of all website traffic comes from mobile phones alone, which is why mobile-friendliness is a must for any website. 

If your site is only optimized for desktops, it’s highly likely that the dimensions will be off when users try to visit on mobile devices. 

In the past, it was common for websites to have two versions: one optimized for desktop, and one optimized for mobile devices. 

However, responsive design has since taken over, which is where your website changes dimensions based on a user’s device. If they’re visiting on a desktop, then desktop dimensions will apply. If they’re on a smartphone, the site will automatically adjust and display correctly on their screen. 

If you aren’t sure if your website is mobile-friendly, the Google Lighthouse Chrome extension is an excellent tool to use (it’s also available as part of Chrome DevTools, in the command line, as a node module, and from a web UI). 

In particular, its SEO audit will provide details on how mobile-friendly your site is. As a bonus, you can also use it to check your Core Web Vitals metrics. 

Tips for making your site as mobile-friendly as possible 

As stated before, using a responsive design is the best way to optimize your website for any type of mobile device. This article has more detailed information on how to build a responsive design, including different frameworks you can use. 

One of the most crucial aspects of a responsive design is to format your viewport meta tag properly. 

What’s that?

The viewport refers to the visible area of a web page on a particular device.  

If you set the width to match the width of a user’s device, your website will scale the page size accordingly, ensuring that it fits on the user’s screen. 

Here’s what the HTML code looks like:

<meta name=“viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0”> 

As you can see, the width is now set to the width of the user’s device, which is what you want. 

Other best practices for mobile optimization include:

• Compressing all your images and video files to reduce load times. 
• Make sure your buttons, links, and other interactive elements are large enough to tap on touchscreen devices. 
• Reduce the number of pop-up ads and interstitials to reduce layout shifts. 

These best practices in combination with a responsive design will ensure your website is fully optimized for mobile devices and desktop users. 

Item #5: Secure Your Website with HTTPS 

If you want to rank well on search engines like Google, then you need to use HTTPS instead of HTTP. This should come as no surprise, as HTTPS has long been the norm. 

Short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, HTTPS encrypts the data sent between a user’s browser and your website, protecting it from hackers. With vanilla HTTP, all information sent between the two, including sensitive information like credit card numbers, is listed in plain text for all to see. 

This makes the data extremely vulnerable to hackers and other malicious agents. 

That’s especially bad if you run an E-commerce store where users regularly enter their sensitive financial information. 

This is why HTTPS was developed in the first place, to add a level of encryption to online user data. 

Google wants its users to enjoy a safe experience when browsing the web, which is why HTTPS is such a strong ranking signal. 

If Google started ranking websites using HTTP, it could spell disaster for its reputation and user experience. 

As a site owner, you’ll need to secure an SSL certificate to enable HTTPS on your website. 

The good news?

It’s easy to get an SSL certificate for free. 

To us, the quickest and easiest way is to claim a free SSL certificate by signing up for a CloudFlare account, which has a free version available. They were actually the first ever company to offer free SSL certificates back in 2014, and they’re still churning them out to this day. 

Hit the Sign Up button to create a basic account and add your website to CloudFlare. Once that’s done, select the free package, and you should be all set (they may recommend that you change some simple settings with your hosting service, but that’s about it). 

Not only will you receive a free SSL certificate, but you’ll be protected from spam attacks and have access to a lightning-fast CDN (content delivery network), which will help you pass the Core Web Vitals test. 

Item #6: Fix Broken Links on Your Website 

Regular link audits are an extremely important aspect of technical SEO. 

What are those?

A link audit is where you go through all your internal links, external links, and backlinks to ensure they all still work. Should you come across a broken link, you should aim to fix it immediately. 

Broken links are bad news for SEO for a variety of reasons, the most obvious being missed opportunities to generate traffic. 

For example, let’s say you wrote an amazing blog based on a trending keyword that’s generating a ton of traffic. Unexpectedly, the link breaks, meaning that everyone who clicks on your #1-ranked blog post on Google sees nothing but a 404 Not Found page. 

Not only will this cause frustration, but you’ll completely miss the chance to convert visitors into leads and customers. 

Broken backlinks can also wreak havoc on your search rankings. 

That’s because all the link equity provided by a backlink disappears whenever it breaks. If some of your most authoritative links suddenly break, your content may get outranked by competitors.

The only way to get that authority back is to fix the broken backlink, which involves emailing site owners to figure out what went wrong. 

Ahrefs is a great tool to use to quickly identify broken backlinks on your website. 

Using its Site Explorer tool, enter your URL into the search bar. 

Under Backlink Profile, navigate to Broken Backlinks. 

You’ll now see a complete list of all the broken backlinks that point to your site. 

To find broken internal and external links on your website, you can use the Broken Link Checker Chrome extension. It will check for all broken links on any given web page. 

If you don’t want to go page by page, you can use Google Search Console to discover your broken internal links all at once. 

After you log in to GSC, click on Pages under Indexing on the left–hand side. 

Remember the Why Pages Aren’t Indexed section from before? Well, you’ll need to visit it again. This time, click on 404 Not Found specifically. 

This will provide a list of all the links on your website that return a 404 Not Found. 

From there, it’s just a matter of fixing all the broken links by:

• Implementing a redirect 
• Deleting the page 
• Fixing any typos or errors in the URL (which still requires a redirect) 

Once all your broken links are cleaned up, you can check this item off the list. 

Item #7: Reduce Duplicate Content with a Canonical Tag 

Duplicate content occurs whenever two identical (or nearly identical) pages appear on a website. It could be that you published the same blog twice, or you may have two practically identical product pages, the only difference being a certain size or color. 

There are lots of reasons why duplicate content may appear, but it’s always bad for SEO. 

Why’s that?

It’s because Google doesn’t want to see duplicate content in its search results (or its index, for that matter). 

Obviously, duplicate content serves no purpose to users and only creates confusion and frustration. It also confuses search engine bots because they aren’t sure which version of the content to include in its index and search results. 

Duplicate content in Google’s index causes its algorithm to alternate between ranking two (or more) identical pages. 

This causes massive spikes and drop-offs in the traffic generation of each page, meaning they’ll all struggle to gain traction. Not only that, but it can split link equity and dilute page authority. 

More recently, Google has started to not index duplicate content at all to avoid this from happening. This means that if you have duplicate pages and no way to distinguish which one you want to index, Googlebot will likely not index any of them. 

The final reason why duplicate content is bad is it wastes your crawl budget. 

Remember, Google will only crawl and index so many pages on your website based on crawl rate and demand. If it spends most of that budget crawling duplicates, Googlebot may not get to your most important pages due to an exceeded budget. 

What can you do to fix duplicate content?

For most websites, the best way is to not publish duplicate pages to begin with. Keep close track of the pages you publish to ensure that you don’t post the same article or landing page twice. 

However, there are other times when duplicate content is unavoidable, such as for E-commerce websites. They often have nearly identical pages for different sizes and colors of their products, which can be disastrous for their SEO performance. 

That is unless they use canonical tags. 

A canonical tag is a piece of HTML code that specifies the ‘master’ version of a group of similar web pages. 

For example, let’s say you sell a computer mouse in three different colors; black, blue, and orange. 

Without a canonical tag, search engine bots won’t know which web page to index, causing issues. 

However, if you designate the black version as ‘canon’ with a canonical tag, search bots will know to index it and ignore the others. 

Implementing canonical tags

Canonical tags go in the head section of a web page’s HTML code. Rel=”canonical” is how you format the tag. 

For example, here’s how you would designate the black computer mouse page as canon:

< link rel=”canonical” href=”www.yoursite.com/products/computer-mouse-black”>

The first step is to add this tag to the black computer mouse page as a self-referential canonical tag. 

From there, you need to copy and paste the same tag on each duplicate page. In this scenario, the canonical tag needs to go in the head section of the blue and orange mouse pages. 

This will let bots know that the black version is canon and to ignore the other two colors. 

Also, this method only works for parts of your website that are in HTML. 

For non-HTML parts of your website, such as downloadable guides and multimedia files, you’ll need to insert canonical tags into your HTTP headers instead. 

For instance, you may offer the same video in several different formats. While this is convenient for users, it can create duplicate content issues. 

By using canonical tags in your HTTP headers, you can specify to search engines which version of the video you want to include in search results. 

Here’s how to format a canonical tag in an HTTP header:

<https://www.yoursite.com/media/awesome-video>; rel=”canonical” 

As long as you use canonical tags for all your similar pages and media files, you won’t have any duplicate content issues on search engines. 

Wrapping Up: What to Do After Clearing the List 

Congratulations, your technical SEO is now in perfect order. 

That was a lot to go over, so here’s a quick recap of why each checklist item matters:

1. Fast loading speed is integral for passing Google’s Core Web Vitals test. 
2. Resolving crawling and indexing errors ensures crucial pages aren’t missing from Google’s index. 
3. A logical site structure benefits both users and your performance on search engines. 
4. Mobile optimization is a must in today’s age. 
5. Every website needs secure browsing via HTTPS. 
6. Broken links will negatively impact SEO and hurt your user experience. 
7. Duplicate content can cause your content to not get indexed. 

Do you need expert help with your SEO strategy?

HOTH X is our managed service where we develop a winning SEO strategy based on your specific needs, and every client receives a technical SEO audit, so don’t wait to get in touch to learn more!     

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