Rank on Google · 5 min read
Technical SEO checklist: the issues that quietly cost you rankings
A technical SEO checklist: how to read the crawl report, what to fix first, and why Core Web Vitals matter for Google and AI search.
Fix errors first, then warnings
The crawl groups issues by severity. Errors stop pages from being found or shown at all: broken pages, broken internal links, missing titles, blocked crawling and HTTP pages that don't redirect to HTTPS. Fix these before anything else.
Warnings make pages rank worse than they could: duplicate titles, missing descriptions, slow responses and sitemaps that list redirects or noindex pages. Notices are polish.
Keep the sitemap clean
Your XML sitemap tells Google and AI crawlers which URLs matter. It should list only pages that:
- Return HTTP 200 (no redirects, no 404s)
- Are indexable (no noindex)
- Are the canonical version of the page
Core Web Vitals
Google measures real-user experience with three metrics. Good thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5s, Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1.
The usual fixes: compress and preload the hero image, serve modern formats (WebP/AVIF), defer non-critical JavaScript, use a CDN and set width/height on images and embeds.
Re-crawl after fixing
Run the crawl again after you deploy fixes; resolved issues are ticked off in your action plan automatically. Then use Search Console's URL Inspection to request re-indexing of the most important pages.
See where your client stands
Run a free check to see what AI says about a brand today, or start a 14-day trial.