The 100-Point Technical SEO Checklist: Audit, Fix, and Optimize Your Website for Google and AI

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's user experience metrics that directly influence ranking. They measure three dimensions: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) for loading performance, Interaction to Next Paint (INP, replacing FID) for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for visual stability.

Target thresholds: LCP under 2.5 seconds (good), INP under 200 milliseconds (good), CLS under 0.1 (good). Measure your real-user data in Google Search Console's Core Web Vitals report and Google PageSpeed Insights. Lab data is useful for debugging; field data is what Google actually uses for ranking.

• LCP <2.5s: optimize hero image (preload, WebP, correct size)
• INP <200ms: reduce JavaScript execution, minimize third-party scripts
• CLS <0.1: set explicit width/height on all images and embeds
• Measure with: GSC Core Web Vitals report, PageSpeed Insights, CrUX
• Test on mobile — Google uses mobile-first indexing

Crawlability & Indexation

Google cannot rank pages it cannot crawl and index. Crawlability issues are the most impactful technical problems because they block all other SEO efforts. Audit your robots.txt to ensure it does not block CSS, JavaScript, or important page paths — a misconfigured robots.txt is one of the most common and damaging technical SEO errors.

Review your indexation status in Google Search Console's Pages report. Understand each reason Google gives for not indexing pages: 'Crawled - currently not indexed' means Google visited but chose not to index (content quality issue); 'Discovered - currently not indexed' means Google knows the page exists but has not crawled it yet (crawl budget issue); 'Excluded by noindex tag' means you or a plugin is intentionally blocking indexation.

• robots.txt: allow CSS, JS, and all content paths
• noindex tags: audit every page — no accidental noindex in production
• Canonical tags: every page has a self-referential canonical or points to the correct canonical URL
• XML sitemap: includes all indexable pages, excludes noindex and redirects
• Sitemap submitted in GSC and returning 200 status
• No 404 errors in internal links — fix or redirect all broken links

Site Architecture

Site architecture determines how link authority flows through your site and how deep Google must crawl to reach your most important pages. Every important page should be reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage. Pages buried 6+ levels deep receive significantly less crawl budget and rank authority.

URL structure should reflect your content hierarchy. Use lowercase letters, hyphens as word separators, and descriptive keywords in the URL path. Avoid dynamic parameters in URLs that should be indexed. Keep URLs as short as meaningful — remove unnecessary subdirectories.

• All important pages within 3 clicks of homepage
• Breadcrumb navigation on all interior pages
• Consistent URL structure (lowercase, hyphens, descriptive)
• No orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them)
• Redirect chains: maximum 1 redirect per URL, fix chains
• 301 redirects for all moved or deleted pages

Schema Markup Audit

Schema markup is structured data that helps Google (and AI systems) understand what your content is about. It is not a direct ranking factor for most schema types, but it enables rich results, improves entity understanding, and is a primary source for AI Overview and AI citation content.

Required schema types for most Florida business websites: Organization (sitewide), WebPage (every page), LocalBusiness (location pages), FAQPage (pages with FAQ sections), BreadcrumbList (every interior page), Article or BlogPosting (blog/guide pages), and Service (service pages). Validate all schema with Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org validator.

• Organization: name, url, logo, sameAs social profiles
• LocalBusiness: address, phone, hours, areaServed, geo coordinates
• FAQPage: complete Q&A pairs, no partial answers
• BreadcrumbList: matches visible breadcrumb navigation
• Article: author, datePublished, dateModified on all content pages
• Service: name, description, provider, areaServed
• AggregateRating: if you have review data to display
• Validate with: Rich Results Test, Schema.org Validator

Mobile-First Optimization

Google indexes the mobile version of your website first. If your mobile experience is degraded — smaller content, missing schema, blocked resources — your rankings will suffer even for desktop searches. Test your site's mobile experience with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and by manually testing on multiple device sizes.

Mobile-specific issues to audit: viewport meta tag present and correct, touch targets at least 48x48px and 8px apart, font sizes minimum 16px for body text to avoid auto-zoom on iOS, no horizontal scrolling, tap-to-call links on phone numbers (tel: links), and clickable elements not too close together.

Page Speed

Page speed is a direct ranking factor and a critical conversion factor. Slow pages lose both rankings and customers. For Florida business websites, target a Time to First Byte (TTFB) under 600ms, a First Contentful Paint (FCP) under 1.8 seconds, and LCP under 2.5 seconds.

The highest-impact speed optimizations are: convert all images to WebP or AVIF format (50-70% smaller than JPEG/PNG with equal quality), implement lazy loading for images below the fold, minimize and defer non-critical JavaScript, enable browser caching with correct Cache-Control headers, and use a CDN for static assets.

• Images: WebP/AVIF format, correct dimensions, compression
• Lazy load: all images below the fold
• JavaScript: defer non-critical JS, remove unused JS
• CSS: minify, remove unused CSS (use PurgeCSS for frameworks)
• Server: TTFB <600ms — upgrade hosting if needed
• CDN: serve static assets from edge locations
• Caching: Cache-Control headers on static assets (1 year)
• HTTP/2 or HTTP/3: enabled on your server

Security & Trust

Security signals affect both rankings and user trust. HTTPS is a confirmed (if minor) ranking factor. More importantly, browsers display 'Not Secure' warnings on HTTP pages, which destroys conversion rates and signals poor site quality to Google's quality raters.

Audit security headers using securityheaders.com: implement HSTS (Strict-Transport-Security), Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, and Referrer-Policy. These headers signal a professionally maintained site and protect against common attack vectors.

AI Search Readiness

AI search systems (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity) require crawlable, semantic HTML to extract and cite content. JavaScript-rendered content that requires client-side execution may be missed by AI crawlers. Ensure your most important content renders in the initial HTML response, not only after JavaScript executes.

Semantic heading structure is critical for AI content extraction. Use H1 for the page title (one per page), H2 for major sections, H3 for subsections. AI systems use heading hierarchy to understand content structure and extract relevant passages for citation.

• Server-side or static rendering for all important content
• Semantic HTML5 elements: article, section, nav, main, aside
• Logical heading hierarchy: H1 → H2 → H3 (no skipping levels)
• Allow AI crawlers: check robots.txt for GPTBot, Google-Extended blocks
• FAQ sections with complete Question/Answer markup
• Definition lists for key terms and concepts
• Tables for comparative data — AI systems extract table data well
• Clear entity signals: business name, location, services in first paragraph