10 Technical SEO Checklist for 2024

Technical SEO may sound complex and intimidating at first glance. No matter how tough it may sound, it is very crucial for the SEO performance of a website. Consider this as providing your website with a strong foundation to perform up to its peak potential. It works with the stuff that runs behind the stage and is not visible to the users, like site loading speed or mobile friendliness. It covers a huge ground, so a technical SEO checklist will really help beginners.

So, here we are with 10 Technical SEO checklists that will help you build a proper understanding of how technical SEO works. Without beating around the bushes, buckle up and let’s get started.

The main motive of SEO is to rank your website higher on the SERP, and technical SEO is no different. It works with the inner elements of the website, like the source codes and site security. The goal of technical SEO is to ensure that your website has a strong architecture that is optimized to perform better in the rankings. It also ensures that the search engine can crawl your website properly to clearly understand the contents of every webpage and rank them properly. In simple terms, technical SEO works on the infrastructure of your website and optimizes it for a higher position in search rankings.

There are six core points of technical SEO. They are:

1. Site Speed: The faster the website loads, the better user experience it offers. Your visitor will leave your website even before the page loads if the site is too slow. As a result, your bounce rate will increase significantly.
2. Mobile Optimization: According to the latest report of 2024, over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile phone users. It is a result of over 90%of the total internet users accessing the internet using mobile phones. So, you must optimize your website for mobile usage, or you will lose traffic significantly.
3. Crawling and Indexing: You want search engines to crawl and index your website properly, right? You must implement XML sitemaps and robots.txt files that help the search engine discover and categorize your web pages.
4. Structured Data: Structured data helps the search engines understand the contents of a web page to crawl and rank it properly. It uses specific tags like Schema Markup.
5. Security: Having proper website security like HTTP through SSL is a crucial ranking factor. It also builds trust in the users to engage in financial transactions with the website.
6. Fixing Errors: Finally, technical SEO also focuses on fixing any broken links or 404 errors. Besides, it includes removing duplicate content from the website.

This aspect of SEO is highly important as it directly influences the search engines crawling, indexing, and understanding of your website to rank it in the SERP. Without proper technical SEO, no matter how cool your website is or how great your content is, it will not be ranked in the deserving position. To be specific, let’s look at some of the key reasons that make technical SEO crucial.

Improves Crawlability and Indexing

It is no secret that search engines send bots (crawlers) to explore your website. For technical reasons, if the crawler can’t access your website properly, your website will not be ranked on the search engine result page. Technical SEO is the lifesaver here, ensuring the site is structured properly so that the crawler can access and index your website properly.

Boosts User Experience

Technical SEO factors like fast loading time, mobile friendliness, HTTPS site security, and other stuff don’t just rank you higher on the SERP but also boost the user experience of your website. A well-optimized website keeps the visitors engaged, reducing the bounce rate. It also has a big impact on search engine ranking.

Contributes to Better Search Rankings

Search engines always prioritize websites that have no technical issues for rankings. If your website has broken links, duplicate content, or is not mobile-friendly, the search engine is most likely to penalize it in the ranks. Technical SEO saves you from such penalties and helps you maintain the quality of your infrastructure according to search engine guidelines.

Enables Rich Results

With the proper implementation of technical SEO, such as structured data, your website will come into search engine result pages with enhanced features like product ratings and prizes. It helps make your website stand out in the crown and appear interesting, increasing your CTRs (Click Through Rates) and driving more organic traffic.

Prevents Costly Errors

Technical errors like broken links, missing meta tags, or duplicate content can cause significant damage to your search engine rankings. Using technical SEO, you can address these issues properly and solve them for better ranking performance.

The various sectors like on-page, off-page, and technical SEO can easily confuse you if you are new in this industry. Since they serve the same goal of ranking high through optimizing different aspects of a website, sometimes you can lose your way around these topics. That’s why on-page SEO vs technical SEO or off-page SEO vs technical SEO is a common discussion topic in the industry.

So, we have prepared a breakdown of all these SEO types to help you understand the basics and differences between them.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO mainly works on the visible elements of your website, like the content on your web page. This SEO approach involves doing keyword research, user engagement, internal linking, and making sure the content of your website adds value to the readers. The purpose is to make your website content more visible to your target audience by making it relevant for both users and search engines.

Off-page SEO

As the name suggests, off-page SEO works on topics outside your website to make it rank higher by building authority and credibility. The major job here is to build high quality backlinks, which signals the search engine to trust the content on your website. It boosts the authority of your website and increases the potential of ranking high in the search engine result pages.

Technical SEO

Finally, technical SEO focuses on the backend infrastructure of your website, solving technical issues. It also ensures that the user experience of browsing your website is top-notch, and the search engine crawler can crawl through your website without any problems ranking it properly. It will strengthen the technical architecture of your website and increase your click-through rates.

If you are a website owner, you can contact a technical SEO agency for Technical SEO or just do it yourself. But, without proper knowledge and experience, you should not mess with the architecture of your website.

After hearing all that about technical SEO, anyone will be worried at first. Because there are lots of things to cover, and the process can be pretty complex. Therefore, here are 10 technical SEO checklists with pointers that you can follow as a beginner.

1. Ensure Fast Page Loading Speed

• Use technical SEO tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze your website’s loading time
• Compress image files, implement browser caching, and use a CDN (Content Development Network)
• Optimize HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to minimize file size

2. Implement Mobile Optimization

• Use responsive design to ensure your site can adapt to different screen ratios of phones
• Check your website’s mobile performance with Google’s Mobile Friendly Test
• Ensure buttons, fonts, and images are optimized for touchscreen mobile phones.

3. Use HTTPS for Website Security

• Make sure to secure your website using an SSL certificate to use HTTPS
• HTTPS builds user trust, and Google prefers secure websites for ranking

4. Create an XML Sitemap

• Generate an XML sitemap and submit it to Google using the Google Search Console
• The sitemap will help the search engine find out and index all the important web pages of your website easily

5. Optimize Robots.txt File

• Check your Robots.txt file and make sure that it is not blocking any important page from being crawled
• Use this file to guide your website through your website to show which pages to crawl and which pages to ignore

6. Fix Crawl Errors

• Check Google Search Console to find out any broken links (404 Errors) or crawl errors
• Use 301 redirects to send both bots and users from the broken pages to the active ones

7. Implement Structured Data

• Use Schema markup to enhance the appearance of your website in the search engine result pages
• Use structured data for reviews, products, FAQs, and events to stand out in the list of search results

8. Ensure Canonical URLs

• Implement canonical tags to specify the preferred version of the page and avoid issues raised by duplicate content
• It helps the search engine to index different versions of the same content

9. Optimize URL Structure

• Create descriptive and clean URLs and include relevant keywords in it
• Do not use random numbers or strings in a URL

10. Check for and Remove Duplicate Content

• Find duplicate contents using tools like Screaming Frog or Siteliner
• Modify duplicate contents, use 301 redirections, or use canonical tags to ensure the uniqueness of every page

As you can see, technical SEO is pretty complicated if you don’t have enough experience in it. Also, if you don’t have a dedicated SEO team to handle different aspects of SEO, you shouldn’t mess with things you don’t know about. So, what should you do to ensure a proper technical SEO for your website?

Here comes VISER X, providing the ultimate technical SEO solutions globally. It is a well-reputed and popular SEO agency in Bangladesh. We do a technical SEO audit initially to identify the technical SEO issues. With almost a decade of experience in all aspects of SEO, we are the ultimate technical SEO agency in the industry. So, contact us now before your competitors get to the top position.

Is SSL a must for technical SEO?

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate is important not only for SEO but also for creating trust and credibility. If your site has an SSL certificate, you will see HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secured) before your website.

What is a Robots.txt file?

Robots.txt is a simple plain text file that guides the search engine crawlers to the accessible web pages of a website. A proper Robots.txt file is important for technical SEO to ensure that the crawlers are properly indexing all accessible pages of your site.

What is an XML sitemap?

XML sitemap is a file that lists all the web pages, content, and media of a website. It is a crucial file for technical SEO because it ensures the search engine can crawl, read, and index all the web pages and their contents properly.