The technical SEO checklist we run before launch

Most founders think SEO means keywords and blog posts. Content matters, but it's the second step. The first step is making sure search engines can crawl, understand, and trust your site at all. Skip that, and the best content in the world won't rank.

Here's the checklist we run on every build before it ships, in the order it actually matters.

1. A sitemap that's actually correct

A sitemap.xml tells search engines every URL worth indexing. The mistake we see most often isn't a missing sitemap, it's a stale one: pages that 404, old slugs that were renamed, or new pages that never got added because the sitemap was hand-written once and forgotten.

Generate it programmatically from your actual routes and content source, so it's never out of sync with what's live.

const urls = [...staticPaths, ...posts.map((p) => `/blog/${p.slug}`)];

2. Robots.txt that points at the sitemap

A one-line robots.txt that allows crawling and references the sitemap is enough for most sites:

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Don't overthink this file. The common failure mode is a leftover Disallow: / from a staging environment that never got removed before launch, which quietly de-indexes the entire site.

3. Canonical tags on every page

Without a canonical tag, search engines can treat /services and /services/ and ?ref=twitter variants as separate pages, splitting your ranking signal across duplicates. One <link rel="canonical"> per page, pointing at the clean URL, fixes this.

4. Structured data that matches your business

Organization or ProfessionalService schema on every page tells search engines what kind of entity you are, which feeds knowledge panels and rich results. BlogPosting schema on articles adds author, publish date, and image data that can win you a richer search snippet. FAQPage schema on a page with real question-and-answer content can surface directly in search results above the fold.

The catch: schema has to accurately describe what's on the page. Marking up content that isn't visibly present is a guideline violation that can get a site penalised, not boosted.

5. Open Graph and Twitter Card tags

These don't affect Google rankings directly, but they determine what a link looks like when someone shares it on Slack, X, or LinkedIn. A missing og:image means your link preview is a blank grey box, which tanks click-through from social shares, which is a real (if indirect) traffic source you're leaving on the table.

6. Core Web Vitals

Google has confirmed page experience is a ranking factor, and slow sites lose organic traffic independent of any algorithm update, because users bounce before the page finishes loading. We've written the full breakdown of how we hit 100 on Lighthouse on every build in our performance checklist. If SEO and speed feel like separate workstreams on your project, that's usually a sign they're being handled by different people who aren't talking to each other.

7. Internal linking that isn't an afterthought

Search engines use internal links to understand which pages on your site matter most and how topics relate to each other. A blog post that never links to a relevant service page, or a service page with no links to supporting content, wastes the authority your homepage has built up. Link between related content deliberately, not just in a generic "related posts" footer.

What this doesn't cover

None of the above guarantees rankings. Off-page factors like backlinks, domain age, and content depth matter enormously, and no technical checklist substitutes for actually answering the questions your prospective customers are searching for. But a site with broken technical SEO is playing with one hand tied behind its back regardless of how good the content is. Fix the foundation first.

We bake all seven of these into every Custom Build and treat SEO as a first-class deliverable, not a bolt-on at the end.

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Not sure whether your current site has these basics covered? Get in touch and we'll do a quick audit, no obligation.