However good your content is, if Google can't crawl your site properly, pages load slowly on mobile, or the same content is published at three different addresses, you'll fall behind in the rankings. Technical SEO deals with fixing these infrastructure problems, and most fixes are done once and keep their effect for a long time. This 15-point technical SEO checklist was prepared so that you or your web agency can audit your site; for each point you'll find what to look at and how to check it.
Crawling and Indexing
1. The robots.txt file. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Make sure there's no "Disallow: /" line blocking important pages or the entire site. In the field, we've seen cases where, after a site redesign, the staging environment's robots file was carried over to the live site and the whole site stayed out of the index for months.
2. XML sitemap. Does yoursite.com/sitemap.xml exist, is it up to date, has it been submitted to Search Console? The sitemap should not contain deleted pages or redirected URLs.
3. Index status. In Search Console's Pages report, confirm that your important pages are "Indexed". Accidentally added noindex tags tend to appear especially after theme and plugin updates. To read the report, you can use our Search Console guide.
Security and URL Structure
4. HTTPS. Every page must load over a secure connection; the http version should 301-redirect to https. A "not secure" warning in the browser hurts both rankings and trust.
5. A single version. Addresses with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, should all redirect to one main version. Otherwise Google may see the same page as four separate pages.
6. Canonical tags. Every page should have a canonical tag pointing to itself or the main version. On e-commerce sites this is critical for filtered and sorted category URLs.
7. Clean URLs. Short, meaningful addresses without Turkish characters, such as /hizmetler/tanitim-filmi. Addresses like ?id=123 tell neither users nor Google anything.
Speed and Mobile Experience
8. Core Web Vitals. Enter your homepage and one service page into PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile results. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be under roughly 2.5 seconds. On most sites, the problem comes from uncompressed images, too many plugins and a slow server.
9. Image optimization. Images should be in WebP format, at their actual display size and ideally under 200 KB. If promo videos are embedded on the page, they should be added via a video platform with lazy loading, not as direct files.
10. Mobile-friendliness. Open the page on a phone: is there horizontal scrolling, are buttons big enough to tap, can text be read without zooming? Google evaluates your site primarily through its mobile version.
On-Page Structure
11. Title and meta description. Every page should have a unique title tag of around 60 characters and a meta description of 140–160 characters. Using the same title on every page is one of the most common mistakes.
12. Heading hierarchy. One H1 per page, with logical H2s and H3s beneath it. Using heading tags randomly for design purposes breaks the structure.
13. Broken links and 404s. Find internal broken links with a free crawler (for example, desktop crawling tools that have a free version). Redirect deleted pages with a 301 to the closest relevant page; but don't redirect everything to the homepage.
Structured Data and Local Signals
14. Structured data (Schema). Add LocalBusiness or Organization schema for business details, Article for blog posts, and FAQPage for FAQ sections. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test. This lets you appear richer in search results.
15. Name, address, phone consistency. The contact details on your site should match your Google Business Profile and directory listings exactly. Even small differences like "Esenyurt / İstanbul" versus "Esenyurt-İstanbul" can count as inconsistencies. For this pillar of local SEO, see also our Google reviews article.
How Often Should You Use This List?
For most businesses, a full audit twice a year and a speed and index check once a month is enough. After a site redesign, theme change or new plugin installation, always go through the list from the start; most technical problems arise precisely during these transitions. Once the technical foundation is in place, results come from content and authority, the other two pillars of SEO.
At FG Production, every corporate and e-commerce site we build goes through this checklist before handover, and in the first month of our SEO package we prepare a full technical audit report for existing sites. You can explore our corporate website and SEO packages, starting from 15.000₺ + VAT, in the packages section, or write to us for a technical audit of your site.