Technical SEO has exactly one job: remove everything that stops a search engine from finding, reading and indexing your pages. Content quality comes after that.
1. Indexing status
Open the Pages report in Search Console. If more pages are excluded than indexed, find out why before anything else. The usual causes: a noindex tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere, or the page returning 404 or a redirect.
2. robots.txt
One wrong Disallow line can hide an entire site. Make sure you are not blocking CSS and JavaScript — if Google cannot render the page, it cannot judge it properly.
3. XML sitemap
It should contain only URLs you want indexed, that return 200, and that are self-canonical. Redirected or blocked URLs do not belong in a sitemap.
4. Canonical tags
Every page should reference itself unless there is a deliberate reason not to. Pagination, filters and URLs carrying UTM parameters are the most common source of errors.
5. Redirect chains
Chains like A → B → C burn crawl budget and dilute link value. Collapse them to a single hop. Convert 302s to 301s where the move is permanent.
6. Broken links and 404s
Internal links should never 404. Deleted pages that hold external links should be 301-redirected to the closest equivalent.
7. Duplicate content
The same content reachable from multiple URLs is a widespread problem: with and without www, HTTP and HTTPS, with and without a trailing slash. Redirect to one canonical version.
8. Titles and meta descriptions
Produce a list of missing, duplicated and auto-generated titles. Aim for 50–60 characters on titles and 140–160 on descriptions.
9. Heading hierarchy
One h1 per page, with logically ordered h2 and h3 beneath it. Never use heading tags for visual size.
10. Mobile parity
Google indexes the mobile version. Content present on desktop but hidden on mobile is content that does not get indexed. Horizontal scrolling, small tap targets and unreadable font sizes cause problems too.
11. Structured data
Required to win rich results. Validate with the Rich Results Test; broken markup is worse than no markup.
12. Log file review
Server logs show which pages search bots crawl and how often. If your important pages are rarely crawled, your internal linking is the problem.
Order of priority
Do not try to fix everything at once. Work in this order: issues blocking indexing → duplicate content → redirect chains → titles and descriptions → structured data → speed. Effort spent on the later items before the first two is largely wasted.