Technical SEO Checklist — 18 Points You Can Check Yourself
The site looks fine, the copy isn't bad either, and still almost nobody scrolls past the first screen. More often than not, that isn't a writing problem — Google either can't find the site, finds it slowly, or reads it differently than intended. The gap usually sits in a handful of technical lines nobody has looked at.
The 18 checks below are grouped into five blocks: indexing, speed, mobile, structured data, multilingual setup. Each one says what to look at, what it means, and how to fix it — most take a couple of minutes with a browser and free tools, nothing paid.
Indexing: does Google even see you (1–4)
None of the design work matters if Google can't reach the page in the first place. This block checks access itself.
1. Open robots.txt
Type yoursite.az/robots.txt into your browser. A Disallow: / line means the entire site is hidden from search — usually a line left over from a staging build. Remove it, then ask Search Console to recrawl.
2. Search for a noindex tag
Page missing from Google even though robots.txt is open? View the page source (right-click → "View Page Source") and search for noindex — developers often leave it in from a test version. Found it, remove it. One catch: if that same URL is also blocked in robots.txt, Google never gets far enough to read the noindex tag at all — Google's own documentation says exactly that, access has to open first.
3. Check the canonical tag
Find the line carrying rel="canonical" in the page source. Does the address match with www, with https, and the correct domain? A wrong canonical can make one version of your site compete against itself — and both end up weaker for it.
4. Check when your sitemap was last read
Search Console → Sitemaps shows a last-read date. An old date or an error badge means new pages are waiting weeks for Google to find them on its own. Refreshing the file and resubmitting takes a minute.
Speed: three numbers, a real target (5–8)
Speed isn't a feeling anymore — Google scores it against three specific measurements. The official thresholds: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1.
5. LCP — when the biggest element appears
Run your address through PageSpeed Insights and look at "Largest Contentful Paint". Past 2.5 seconds usually means an uncompressed hero image or a web font that loads too late. Preload the image visible on the first screen, defer everything else.
6. INP — the gap between a click and a response
Same report, look for "Interaction to Next Paint". Anything over 200 milliseconds means the browser stalls for a moment after a tap — usually heavy JavaScript blocking the main thread. Defer scripts that aren't needed immediately.
7. CLS — the page jumping around
On a phone, does text or a button shift position while the page loads? That happens when images have no reserved space, or a banner slots in after the rest of the content. Adding width/height or a CSS aspect-ratio to every image usually fixes it.
8. Weigh your images and fonts
Look at the "Properly size images" warning in the PageSpeed report. A handful of uncompressed images can stretch the first load by seconds regardless of the CDN. Switching to WebP or AVIF is usually enough on its own.
Mobile fit (9–11)
Most visitors arrive on a phone — this block catches what desktop testing hides.
9. Open it on your own phone, off Wi-Fi
Use mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. Does text read without zooming, and does anything scroll sideways? Sideways scroll usually means the viewport meta tag is missing or wrong.
10. Check the gap between tap targets
Tap buttons with your thumb, without zooming in. If two buttons sit close enough that you hit the wrong one, that costs you both a mobile score and a real order.
11. Fill in the form on a phone, all the way
Does a number field open the numeric keyboard? If not, people abandon the form partway through more often — that isn't a design nitpick, it's a lost enquiry.
Structured data (12–14)
Structured data doesn't push rankings up on its own, but it changes how your result looks in the search page.
12. Check the schema exists and has no errors
Paste your page address into Google's Rich Results Test. A warning or error means the markup is either outdated or was partially deleted by accident.
13. Check the Organization and Breadcrumb blocks
In the same tool, see whether "Organization" and "BreadcrumbList" show up — they put your site name, logo and page trail into the search result. Small detail, but it reads as a trust signal.
14. Don't mark up reviews of yourself
Adding Review or AggregateRating markup to your own site is tempting, but Google explicitly bans applying it to your own Organization — the markup is meant for genuine reviews collected on third-party platforms, not a rating you wrote yourself.
Multilingual setup (15–18)
If the site runs in two or three languages, this is the block most often skipped — and the cheapest one to fix.
15. Do the hreflang tags point both ways
Each language version's head section needs hreflang lines pointing to the others — and it has to run in both directions. Google says it plainly: if two pages don't both point to each other, the tags get ignored. If the AZ page links to RU, RU has to link back to AZ.
16. Is x-default set
Where does a visitor land whose language doesn't match any version on the site? That's what x-default is for — without it, Google guesses instead of you.
17. Does each language version carry its own canonical
AZ, RU and EN versions should each carry a canonical pointing to themselves. If all three point to one version, the other two effectively don't exist for Google.
18. Check the language codes
Do codes like hreflang="en" match the official ISO 639-1 list? Unofficial region codes like "UK" or "EU" are simply ignored by Google — a mistake that shows up more often than it should.
Every one of these looks trivial on its own — right up until one of them turns out to be a disallow line, and the other seventeen stop mattering.
If running through the list yourself turns up problems in more than five of these, fixing them one at a time isn't the efficient path: our technical SEO service ranks the findings by impact and separates what takes a day from what takes a month. If you want a number before you commit to anything, our free site speed and SEO audit tool takes your address and explains which item is the problem in plain language.
