2025 SEO Success: Ultimate Technical Checklist
The first step in a comprehensive SEO strategy is improving your technical SEO.
No matter what industry your brand or company is in, the principles of technical SEO have never been more critical. Ensuring your website is technically sound increases organic traffic, ranking keywords, and conversions.
Here is your ultimate checklist to ensure you’re putting your best technical SEO foot forward.
1. Improve core web vitals
Google’s Core Web Vitals are critical metrics that assess a website’s overall user experience and influence rankings. Here’s a breakdown of each metric.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the time it takes for the biggest element on the page to load (i.e., the largest picture). To provide a positive user experience, this should happen within 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures user interface responsiveness. INP replaced First Input Delay (FID) as part of Core Web Vitals on March 12, 2024. Acceptable INP reports are <=200ms.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the visual stability of elements on the screen. Sites should strive for their pages to maintain a CLS of less than .1 seconds.
You can measure these ranking factors in a Google Search Console report, showing which URLs have potential issues.
Here are the performance ranges for each status:
| Good | Needs Improvement | Poor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP | <=2.5s | <=4s | >4s |
| INP | <=200ms | <=500ms | >500ms |
| CLS | <=0.1s | <=0.25s | >0.25s |
Tools and tips for improving core web vitals
- Use Google PageSpeed Insights and Webpagetest.org to check performance.
- Optimizations you can make to improve website speed include:
- Implementing lazy-loading for non-critical images
- Optimizing image formats for the browser
- Improve JavaScript performance
2. Optimize for AI search engines
Technical SEO must transcend traditional speed metrics and embrace the nuances of generative engine optimization (GEO), otherwise known as showing up in AI search engine results.
While Core Web Vitals, particularly INP, remain essential for user experience, the focus should shift towards building a site that understands and caters to complex, conversational queries.
Optimization for natural language processing is crucial, demanding content that answers user intent thoroughly and anticipates follow-up questions. Furthermore, as AI-driven personalization becomes more prevalent, websites must ensure they can handle dynamic content changes without compromising core SEO elements, while also preparing for the rise of voice search through schema implementation and optimization for long-tail, question-based queries.
3. Replace intrusive interstitials with banners
Intrusive interstitials obstruct the view of the primary content (i.e., website pop-ups). Web managers frequently use them for promotional purposes.
Google recommends avoiding pop-ups for sales promotions or newsletters. They frustrate users and erode trust. Instead, Google suggests carefully placed banners.
Similarly, keeping from overloading pages with ads is essential, as they negatively impact E-E-A-T signals and tank the user experience.
4. Enhance UX beyond avoiding intrusive interstitials
Creating a positive user experience in 2025 extends beyond simply avoiding intrusive interstitials. It necessitates a more nuanced approach, incorporating contextual banners and dynamic content that adapts to user behavior and intent.
Accessibility is paramount, requiring adherence to WCAG guidelines to ensure inclusivity for all users. The adoption of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) should be seriously considered, as they offer a seamless mobile experience with features like offline access and push notifications, ultimately enhancing engagement.
5. Ensure content displays well on mobile devices
Google says pages must load quickly, be easy to navigate, and prioritize mobile-first indexing. Beyond ensuring basic responsiveness, review image sizes and quality to improve page speeds. Conduct an audit of menus, breadcrumbs, internal links, and contact buttons to improve navigation.
Furthermore, the rising prevalence of mobile voice search necessitates specific optimization strategies, ensuring that mobile sites are not only visually accessible but also readily navigable through voice commands. The goal is to create a mobile experience that is not only functional but also intuitive and engaging, catering to the evolving expectations of mobile users.
6. Review safe browsing site status (HTTP vs HTTPS)
Google announced the HTTPS protocol as a ranking factor in 2014. If your site’s pages still use HTTP, it’s time to add an SSL or TLS security certificate.
HTTPS protects visitor data, ensures encryption, and safeguards against hackers and data leaks. It enhances web performance and supports new features like service workers, web push notifications, and existing features like credit card autofill and HTML5 geolocation API, which are not secure with HTTP.
Leverage Google’s Safe Browsing site status tool to review your site’s safe browsing status. The HTTPS report shows the number of your indexed HTTP pages vs. HTTPS.
7. Include signed exchanges for faster page loads
Signed exchanges (SXG) enable Google Search to prefetch your website’s content while maintaining user privacy.
Prefetching—which includes key resources like HTML, JavaScript, and images—helps render web pages quicker when a user clicks on search results. Faster rendering improves the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score, enhancing the overall page experience.
Before implementing SXG, analyze your website’s traffic and loading performance to identify pages or resources that frequently slow down user experience, indicating a need for caching.
Achieving optimal page load speeds in 2025 requires a sophisticated approach that goes beyond basic image compression. Implementing cutting-edge technologies like HTTP/3 and the QUIC protocol significantly enhances data transfer efficiency, leading to faster loading times.
8. Look for crawl errors
Crawl errors occur when a search engine tries to reach a page on your website but fails.
Use Screaming Frog or other crawl tools like Google Search Console to detect crawl errors. Once you’ve crawled the site, look for crawl errors.
When scanning for crawl errors, you’ll want to:
- Identify and fix 401, 404, and 500 errors
- Correctly implement all redirects with 301 redirects (broken pages)
- Fix redirect chains and loops
9. Fix broken links
It’s frustrating for people to click a link on your website and find that it doesn’t take them to the correct or working URL. Bad links negatively impact the user experience for humans and search engine optimization. This scenario applies to internal and external links.
Check for the following optimization opportunities:
- Links that go to an error page (e.g., 401, 403, 404 error codes)
- Links with a 301 or 302 that redirect to another page
- Orphaned pages (pages without any links to them)
- An internal linking structure that is too deep
To fix broken links, update the target URL to the new working page. Remove the link and implement a redirect if the original content no longer exists.
10. Remove duplicate content
Duplicate content can be caused by many factors, including page replication from faceted navigation, having multiple site versions live, and scraped or copied content.
You must only allow Google to index one version of your site. For example, search engines see all of these domains as different websites rather than one website: https://www.abc.com, https://www.abc.com, https://www.abc.com, https://www.abc.com, https://abc.com. If your preferred version is https://www.abc.com, the other three versions should redirect directly to that version.
Fixing duplicate content can be implemented in the following ways:
- Set up 301 redirects to the primary version of the webpage
- Implement no-index or canonical tags on duplicate pages
- Set up parameter handling in Google Search Console
- Set the preferred domain in Google Search Console
- Where possible, delete duplicate content
11. Give URLs a clean structure
Google suggests a website’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. Overly complex URLs cause problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site. As a result, Google may be unable to index your site’s content completely.
Fix these URL issues for better results:
- Session IDs or other unnecessary parameters
- Non-readable characters (e.g., Unicode or emojis)
- Foreign languages not using UTF-8 in URLs
- Underscores instead of hyphens
- Overly complex structures
- Dynamic generation
12. Set up and optimize XML sitemaps
XML sitemaps tell search engines about your site structure and what to index in the SERP.
An optimized XML sitemap includes the following:
- Only 200-status URLs
- Any new content added to your site
- E.g., recent blog posts, products, etc.
- No more than 50,000 URLs
- Sites with more URLs need multiple XML sitemaps to maximize crawl budgets
Exclude the following from the XML sitemap:
- URLs that are 301 redirecting or contain canonical or no-index tags
- URLs with 4xx or 5xx status codes
- URLs with parameters
- Duplicate content
You can check the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console to see if your XML sitemap contains errors.
13. Optimize the robots.txt file
You don’t want every page on your site to appear in the search results. Robots.txt files are instructions for search engine robots on which pages to crawl and index your website. Here are some example URLs you should disallow in your robots.txt file:
- Admin pages
- Temporary files
- Search-related pages
- Cart & checkout pages
- URLs that contain parameters
Confirm your robots.txt file isn’t blocking anything you want to be indexed.
Robots.txt is particularly useful for large websites (5,000+ pages) that need to manage their crawl budget—the maximum number of pages a search engine allocates to crawl a site within a specific timeframe.
Correctly configuring the robots.txt file allows large website managers to prioritize indexing their most important pages and fosters more efficient use of crawl budgets.
Pro tip: The robots.txt file should include the location of the XML sitemap. You can use Google’s robots.txt tester to verify that your file works correctly.
14. Add structured data and schema
Schema markup helps Google understand content better, improving chances of featured snippets and rich results.
Structured data influences your chance of winning the featured snippet at the top of the SERPs. There are many different kinds of schema markups for structuring data for people, places, organizations, local businesses, reviews, and so much more.
You don’t need to know how to code; you can use online schema markup generators. Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool can help create schema markup for your website.
Win featured snippets and PAA with headings, lists, and tables
We don’t need schema code to win the rich snippet. Google uses headings (H2s, H3s, etc.), lists (numbered or bulleted), and tables to improve the richness of the results.
Adding a number in the front of every H2 or H3 for a list-style article helps Google populate the featured snippet and improves the chances of winning the People Also Ask queries.
Ensure list items are shorter than a sentence long and stick to one numbered list per article. Leverage tables for listing technical data or for versus and comparison style content.
15. Review site health regularly
Even small website changes can cause technical SEO site health fluctuations. Internal and external links break if the anchor text is changed on your internal site or the website you’re pointing to.
New website pages or organization, site migrations, and redesigns do not always transfer over important SEO aspects like schema markup, sitemaps, and robots.txt—or move them to a place that Google will not recognize.
Make a plan to run a crawl of your site and look at each aspect of this checklist any time significant changes are made to your website and on a regular schedule (at least every 12 months) to ensure a technical SEO issue doesn’t disrupt organic website traffic.
Conclusion: Strengthen your SEO foundation
A well-optimized website is the foundation of a strong digital presence. By implementing these technical SEO strategies, you’ll enhance user experience and improve search engine rankings, making your site more visible and accessible. Staying proactive with audits and updates ensures long-term success in an ever-changing SEO landscape.
Are you looking for a partner who specializes in technical SEO? We’re here to help!
Contact Perfect Search Media to make your website appear at the top of organic search results.