You will check your site's indexing, sitemap, mobile view, speed and redirects and produce a ranked fix list.
Technical SEO tools love long reports. Run a site through one and you can get a hundred and forty warnings, colour-coded, with a score that makes your site sound broken. Most small business owners close the report, feel bad and fix nothing. A few hire someone to fix all hundred and forty, and spend weeks on issues that never affected a single customer.
This exercise is the opposite. You check a short list of things that actually decide whether Google can find, read and show your important pages, then you rank what you find and give each fix an owner. What you end up with is a list of ten fixes at most, each one tied to a page that matters.
You need Google Search Console set up for your site. If you have not done it yet, go to lesson 9.1, Set up and verify your site, and come back. Some reports need a few days after setup before they show data. Have your keyword map open too, because the priority pages on it decide how you rank every fix.
Add a tab to your spreadsheet called technical check, with columns for the item checked, what you found, the pages affected, whether a priority page is affected, the fix and the owner.
Start with indexing. Open the Page indexing report in Search Console. It shows how many of your pages are indexed and groups the rest by the reason Google gives, such as "Excluded by noindex tag", "Page with redirect", "Not found (404)" or "Crawled, currently not indexed". Lesson 9.3, Page indexing and URL Inspection, explains each reason in detail. For now, look for your priority pages in the not-indexed lists. Any priority page that is not indexed goes straight to the top of your fix list.
Next, check the sitemap. Open the Sitemaps report and confirm that your sitemap from lesson 4.2, Sitemaps and getting new pages found, shows a success status and a sensible number of discovered pages. If it shows an error, or was never submitted, note it.
Then robots.txt. Open your domain followed by /robots.txt and read it, using what you learned in lesson 4.1, Robots.txt, noindex and canonicals do different jobs. Look for any rule that blocks pages you want found, especially a blanket "Disallow: /".
Then HTTPS. Visit your homepage and a few inner pages, typing the address with http rather than https. Each should switch to the https version without a browser warning.
Then the mobile view. Open each priority page on your phone, and check that the main text, headings, images and links are all there, as covered in lesson 4.3, Mobile-first indexing and page experience.
Last, speed. Run PageSpeed Insights on the mobile setting, but not on every page. Most sites are built from a few templates: the homepage, a service page, a blog post, perhaps a product page. Pages built from the same template usually share the same issues, so test one example of each template and note the top two issues for each.
You now have a list of findings. Rank them by their effect on your priority pages. A useful order is: anything that stops a priority page being indexed, then anything that breaks the mobile view or HTTPS on priority pages, then sitemap and robots.txt problems, then speed issues on templates your priority pages use, then everything else.
For each fix, write who will do it. Some are yours: a noindex setting, a missing redirect, an oversized image. Others need a developer or your website builder's support team, such as changes to the theme's code or server settings. For those, write a two-line brief: the page, what PageSpeed Insights or Search Console says, and what outcome you want. A clear brief saves a developer time and saves you money.
Cut the list at ten. If you have more than ten findings, the ones below ten wait for next month's review in lesson 9.4, Build your monthly SEO review routine.
Priya's check found four issues. The Page indexing report listed her P6 page as "Excluded by noindex tag", left over from when she drafted it. Her sitemap had been read successfully. Her robots.txt was fine. HTTPS worked everywhere. On mobile, the reviews section was hidden on her P5 page. PageSpeed Insights flagged a large hero image on her service template and a slow map embed on her contact page.
Her ranked list: first, remove the noindex on the P6 page and request indexing (owner: Priya). Second, change the theme setting that hides reviews on mobile (owner: Priya, with the theme's help pages). Third, compress the hero image on the service template (owner: Priya). Fourth, move the map lower on the contact page or load it only when tapped (owner: developer, with a short brief). Four fixes, three of them hers, all on pages that matter.
Open Search Console and your spreadsheet and work through each check in turn. The activity below asks you to finish with your own ranked list and an owner for every line.
Complete the technical health checklist and write a ranked list of up to ten fixes with an owner for each.
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