Technical SEO is the foundation everything else sits on. Great content on a slow, broken site still ranks poorly. This checklist covers the items we fix first before any content or link work begins.
Core Web Vitals
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) under 2.5 seconds. INP (Interaction to Next Paint) under 200ms. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) under 0.1. These are Google's page experience signals. South African hosting on local servers helps significantly with LCP for local audiences.
Crawlability
A clean robots.txt. An XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console. No orphan pages with zero internal links. Consistent canonical tags on all pages. No redirect chains longer than two hops.
Indexation
Every important page returns a 200 status. No accidental noindex tags on live pages. Pagination handled correctly. Thin or duplicate content pages either improved or canonicalised.
Structured Data
JSON-LD schema for your business type, articles, products, and FAQs. Validated with Google's Rich Results Test. Schema is the primary signal AI search tools use to understand your content.
Mobile and HTTPS
Every page passes Google's mobile-friendly test. HTTPS with a valid certificate. No mixed content warnings.