Technical SEO Checklist for Modern Websites

Technical SEO is the floor, not the ceiling. Pass these checks and content can rank; fail them and even brilliant writing stays invisible. Here is the working checklist we apply to every site that connects to FixRank AI.

Crawlability and indexation

• robots.txt doesn't accidentally block important sections.
• XML sitemap is fresh, gzipped, and submitted in Search Console.
• Canonical tags self-reference correctly on every indexable URL.
• No orphan pages — every URL has at least one internal link.
• Pagination uses clean URLs and consistent canonicals.

Site speed and Core Web Vitals

Google's Core Web Vitals are pass/fail gates on user experience signals. The three to watch: LCP (largest contentful paint), INP (interaction to next paint) and CLS (cumulative layout shift).

1. Serve hero images in modern formats with explicit width and height.
2. Defer non-critical JavaScript; ship less of it.
3. Use a CDN and cache aggressively at the edge.
4. Reserve space for ads, embeds and async content.

Structured data and schema

Structured data is how you tell engines what a page is. It also powers rich results, AI Overviews, and most generative citations.

• Organization schema sitewide
• Article / Product / FAQPage on the appropriate route types
• BreadcrumbList on deep pages
• Validate everything in the Rich Results Test before shipping

Mobile and rendering

Google indexes the mobile version first. SPA frameworks that ship empty HTML and hydrate client-side often hide content from crawlers and from generative engines. Server-render, pre-render, or at minimum ensure critical content lives in the initial HTML response.

Running a continuous audit

A one-time technical audit ages out in weeks. Stacks change, marketers ship pages, regressions sneak in. The only durable answer is continuous crawling — which is the thesis behind the new generation of automated SEO platforms. Connect your site once, let the agent crawl every day, and let the queue tell you what to fix.