Technical SEO in Plain English: a 12-Point Checklist That Ranks

TL;DR: Technical SEO means Google can crawl, understand, and serve your site fast. Work through the 12 items below in order — 80% of the result comes from the first 4.

Why Technical SEO Comes Before Content

Great content on a broken foundation is like an expensive carpet on a wet floor. If your page loads in 6 seconds or breaks on mobile, Google scores you down before reading a word. We saw this on a real project: after compressing images and fixing dimensions, LCP went from 6.2s to 1.8s and contact-form submissions tripled — without a single new word of content.

The 12-Point Checklist, in Priority Order

| # | Item | Acceptable Standard | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | 1 | Mobile LCP speed | Under 2.5 seconds | | 2 | Responsiveness | No horizontal scroll at 360px | | 3 | Unique title tag | 50-60 characters, includes keyword | | 4 | Meta description | 120-155 characters, invites the click | | 5 | One H1 per page | Exactly one, carries the topic | | 6 | H2/H3 structure | Hierarchical, no H1-to-H3 jumps | | 7 | Image alt text | Descriptive, not "image1" | | 8 | Internal links | Every article links to 2+ of your pages | | 9 | Schema | Article on blog, LocalBusiness on city landings | | 10 | Sitemap | Submitted in Search Console, no errors | | 11 | robots.txt | Not accidentally blocking key paths | | 12 | HTTPS | Whole site, no mixed content |

Do the First 4 This Weekend

• [ ] Run your URL through PageSpeed Insights (Mobile tab), note the LCP
• [ ] Open the site on a real phone; if it scrolls sideways, make tables scrollable
• [ ] Open your 5 key pages; make duplicate or empty titles unique today
• [ ] Write meta descriptions that tempt the click, not dry summaries

Those four are usually half the battle. Review the rest monthly.

Two Mistakes We Made Ourselves

Raw tag in prose: we once left a bare html tag in a heading and the whole page returned 500. Lesson: tags and code always go in backticks or code blocks.

Duplicate landing titles: when we launched 10 city landings, the titles were near-identical and Google flagged 4 as duplicates. Each city page needs its own city in the title.

FAQ

Is technical SEO a one-time job?

No. Every new page needs its title and internal links checked. But the full 12-point audit once per quarter is enough.

Speed first or content first?

If LCP is over 4 seconds, speed first. If it is under 2.5, go write content — like the city content clusters that lifted our local rankings.

How do I know Google has seen my pages?

Search Console, Pages section: the Indexed number should climb week by week. If a page sits in "Crawled - currently not indexed" for 2 weeks, strengthen its internal links and hit Request Indexing manually.

Conclusion

Technical SEO is not exciting work; it is checklist work. Keep these 12 items and run through them every quarter — the rankings follow on their own.