The 2025 Technical SEO Checklist For Better Search Results

Reaching the top of a search engine results page (SERP) can feel like solving a constantly changing puzzle. While many businesses focus on crafting engaging content and designing a visually appealing website, these aspects only cover part of the equation. A beautifully designed website loaded with top-tier content won’t amount to much if search engines can’t properly access or understand it. That’s where technical SEO comes in as a foundational component that makes your website accessible, efficient, and easy for both users and search engines to navigate.

Technical SEO refers to the process of optimising your website to meet the technical standards expected by search engines like Google. It ensures that your site can be effectively crawled, indexed, and rendered, and it lays the groundwork upon which your off-page and on-page SEO strategies can thrive. Without it, you’re building your SEO house on shaky ground.

Whether you’re troubleshooting existing issues or giving your site a thorough tune-up, this 2025-focused checklist will help ensure your technical SEO is fully up to speed.

Before getting started: Conducting a pre-audit and gathering the necessary tools

Just like you wouldn’t start home renovations without assessing what needs fixing and preparing the right tools, it’s critical to conduct a pre-audit before diving into technical SEO work. A technical SEO audit evaluates the behind-the-scenes aspects of your website to make sure it runs smoothly and meets search engine requirements.

The first step is to determine your audit’s scope. Are you trying to fix specific problems, like improving site speed, resolving broken links, or reworking your sitemap? Or are you conducting a full-scale audit to identify deeper issues you may not be aware of? Clarifying your objective will help guide your analysis and action plan.

With the objective established, let’s now take a look at the go-to tools for technical SEO that are widely used by professionals:

• Google Search Console: Great for spotting crawl errors, indexing issues, mobile usability problems, and more.
• Screaming Frog: Performs in-depth crawls of your site, helping you uncover broken links, duplicate pages, and structural issues.
• Sitebulb: A visual-heavy tool that displays your website’s technical health in an easily digestible format.
• GA4 (Google Analytics 4): Offers insights into user behaviour and highlights performance gaps.
• Ahrefs and SEMrush: Ideal for analysing backlinks, keyword performance, and competitor data.
• Looker Studio + PageSpeed Insights CLI: Combine these for automated dashboards. Looker Studio can sync with GA4 and GSC to help you monitor indexing and search performance, while PSI CLI can be used to automate Core Web Vitals reports.

Once you’ve assembled your toolkit, focus your audit on the following key areas:

• Crawlability: How easily can search engine bots navigate through your site? Are there obstacles like broken links or disallowed pages?
• Indexability: Are your most important pages being indexed? Or are some being left out due to technical misconfigurations?
• Site speed: Are your pages loading fast enough? If not, how can performance be improved?
• Mobile-friendliness: With mobile devices accounting for over 60% of web traffic, your site must be responsive.
• Content structure: Is your content organised in a way that conveys its relevance and value to both search engines and users?

Once the audit is complete, you’ll probably end up with a long list of issues to address. Prioritise the high-impact items first, such as pages that are being blocked by robots.txt or are returning 4xx errors, as these directly impact your visibility in search results. Next, tackle problems that confuse search engines, like duplicate content and faulty canonical tags. Performance issues come after that, followed by enrichment opportunities like implementing structured data.

These guidelines are just a starting point. Tailor your action plan to your website’s specific needs and goals. And if the scope feels too overwhelming, don’t hesitate to consult a qualified SEO agency in Singapore.

The essentials checklist for improving your technical SEO

1. Verify that your site can be crawled and indexed efficiently

Crawlability and indexability are two fundamental components of SEO. If Googlebot can’t access your content, it can’t index or rank it. Some of the key aspects that determine these characteristics of your site and thus warrant a good look-over include:

• txt: This file instructs search engines on which pages or directories they can access. While it’s fine to block private or duplicate content (like admin pages or filtered search results), make sure you’re not inadvertently blocking important assets like CSS or JavaScript that are essential for rendering your site properly. Use Google Search Console’s robots.txt tester to verify that nothing critical is being excluded.
• XML sitemap: Your sitemap acts as a roadmap for search engines, showing the structure of your site and which pages should be indexed. Make sure it’s clean, updated, and submitted in GSC. Regularly review it to ensure there are no broken links or outdated URLs.
• Noindex/disallow directives: Use these directives carefully, as it’s easy to accidentally exclude valuable content. Tools like Screaming Frog can help you quickly spot such misconfigurations.
• Canonical tags: These tags point search engines to the preferred version or ‘master copy’ of a page when duplicates exist. They’re especially useful for e-commerce product pages, paginated content, or pages with UTM parameters. Ensure that canonicals are correctly implemented and avoid self-referencing or circular references.

2. Review your site architecture

A well-organised site architecture enhances crawl depth, improves navigation, and signals which pages are most important. Consider the following steps to make your website more streamlined:

• Structure your site hierarchically. Think of it like a tree, with your homepage as the trunk, category pages as branches, and individual posts or products as leaves.
• Use internal links to reinforce the hierarchy and distribute page authority throughout the site. Focus on linking to cornerstone content and important conversion pages.
• Introduce breadcrumb navigation (e.g., Home > Blog > SEO Checklist) to help both users and crawlers understand your site’s layout.
• Keep important pages within three clicks of the homepage. This ensures they are easily discoverable and more likely to rank well.

If you operate a smaller website, achieving this could be as simple as organising your pages into clear categories and optimising your navigation menus.

3. Optimise URLs for improved structure

A good URL is easy to read, understand, and share. It also helps search engines interpret your content more accurately. Some pointers to keep in mind when improving your site’s URLs are as follows:

• Avoid lengthy query strings or random parameters. Instead of com/page?id=123, go for example.com/seo-tips-2025.
• Use hyphens to separate words, and keep everything lowercase.
• Keep URLs short and relevant to the topic. Descriptive keywords not only improve SEO but also make your URLs more clickable.
• Ensure your URLs reflect the site hierarchy. For example: com/blog/technical-seo/.
• Avoid changing URLs unnecessarily. If you must, use 301 redirects to preserve SEO value and avoid losing ranking authority.

4. Structure your data

Structured data (often implemented using JSON-LD) adds semantic meaning to your content, making it easier for search engines to interpret and potentially display as rich results.

Some commonly used schema types include:

• Article: For blog posts or news articles
• Product: For e-commerce listings
• FAQ and HowTo: For instructional or informational pages
• Organisation: For describing your company and brand details
• BreadcrumbList: For enhancing site structure and navigational clarity

This code is typically placed in the <head> of your HTML or injected through your CMS. After implementation, use Google’s Rich Results Test to validate and then monitor Search Console enhancement reports.

5. Increase page speed

Google has made it clear that site speed affects rankings. Core Web Vitals are now a central part of that equation. The three primary metrics are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the load time of the largest content block. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures the time from a user’s first interaction to when the browser responds. Should be below 200ms.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Quantifies visual stability. Keep it under 0.1 to avoid annoying layout jumps.

To improve your site’s scores, stick to these best practices:

• Use lazy loading for images/videos
• Compress assets like images, CSS, and JS files
• Enable browser caching
• Minify code and defer non-essential scripts
• Use a CDN for faster global content delivery

6. Implement HTTPS across your entire site

HTTPS encrypts data between your server and users, ensuring secure communication. It’s also a confirmed ranking factor. If your site has yet to fully embrace HTTPS, make sure to heed the steps below as soon as possible to improve your standing in the rankings.

• Get an SSL certificate and ensure it’s correctly configured
• Redirect HTTP URLs to their HTTPS equivalents
• Update all internal links, sitemaps, and canonical tags to reflect HTTPS
• Check for mixed content errors, where HTTPS pages attempt to load HTTP resources

Failure to secure your site could result in browser warnings, lost trust, and reduced rankings.

7. Establish proper redirects

Redirects are essential when pages move or URLs change. Poor implementation can lead to crawl errors and a loss of page equity. A few tips for handling redirects are as follows:

• Use 301 redirects for permanent changes and 302 for temporary ones
• Avoid redirect chains (URL A → URL B → URL C)
• Design a custom 404 page that keeps users on your site with helpful links or a search bar
• Use your CMS or server settings to manage redirects efficiently and consistently

8. Make your site’s UX and UI more mobile-friendly

With Google’s mobile-first indexing, your site’s mobile version can greatly influence your overall rankings. Knowing this, make sure to:

• Adopt a responsive design that adapts seamlessly across devices
• Avoid pop-ups or interstitials that block mobile content
• Use legible fonts, well-sized buttons, and intuitive navigation
• Test usability with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool

Most users browse the web on mobile, so a poor experience here can directly affect your bounce rate and conversions.

Conclusion

While SEO continues to evolve year after year, the technical aspects of your website remain just as crucial as content and backlinks. Without a strong technical foundation, your digital presence will always fall short of its full potential. A technically sound website isn’t just about meeting search engine expectations but also delivering a better, faster, and more accessible experience to your visitors. And in today’s competitive landscape, that’s what ultimately sets successful websites apart.

Hopefully, this checklist serves you well in auditing and enhancing your technical SEO setup. With the right tools, a bit of patience, and some expert insight when needed, you can create a search-engine-friendly website that performs well across all fronts.