Content and links get the attention, but a surprising amount of ranking potential is lost to boring, invisible technical problems: pages search engines can’t crawl, markup they can’t understand, and sites too slow to reward. Here’s the technical SEO checklist we run before — and after — every launch.
Crawlability and indexing
- A clean
robots.txtthat blocks nothing important and points to the sitemap. - An accurate XML sitemap that lists only canonical, indexable URLs.
- One canonical URL per page, with consistent trailing-slash and protocol rules.
- No accidental
noindextags left over from staging — the classic launch-day disaster.
Structured data
Schema.org markup is how you turn a plain result into a rich one. At minimum we ship Organization and WebSite schema site-wide, Article schema on blog posts, FAQPage where relevant, and BreadcrumbList for navigation. Valid JSON-LD, tested against Google’s Rich Results tool, not guessed at.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Rankings and revenue both track load time. We hold pages to a performance budget and monitor real-user LCP, INP and CLS, because a fast lab score means little if real phones on real networks tell a different story.
The fundamentals that still matter
- Semantic HTML with a single, descriptive
<h1>per page. - Descriptive, unique title tags and meta descriptions written for humans first.
- Descriptive
alttext on meaningful images. - Internal links that give crawlers a clear map of what matters.
- HTTPS everywhere, with old URLs 301-redirected so you never throw away earned authority.
None of this is glamorous. All of it compounds. Get the technical foundation right and every piece of content you publish afterwards works harder.