Technical SEO is the foundation that everything else sits on. You can have the best content in Canada, the most glowing reviews, and a beautifully designed website — but if Google can't crawl and index your site properly, you won't rank. Technical issues are also uniquely damaging because they often fly under the radar: a misconfigured robots.txt or an accidental noindex tag can quietly suppress your entire site's visibility for months before anyone notices.
This is the complete checklist we run on every new client website. We've organized it into 10 categories, starting with the highest-impact issues and working down to the finer details. Work through it methodically, document what you find, and prioritise fixes by impact before effort.
1. HTTPS and Security
HTTPS has been a confirmed Google ranking signal since 2014, and today it's table stakes — not a differentiator. Any site that isn't fully HTTPS will display a "Not Secure" warning in Chrome, which destroys trust and increases bounce rates. For Canadian businesses collecting contact form data or handling payments, HTTPS is also a legal obligation under PIPEDA.
- Site uses HTTPS — SSL certificate is active and valid
- All HTTP URLs redirect to HTTPS with a 301 permanent redirect
- No mixed content warnings — all assets (images, scripts, stylesheets) load over HTTPS. Check with Chrome DevTools Security tab.
- SSL certificate expiry date is more than 30 days away — set a calendar reminder to renew
2. Crawlability and Indexing
Before Google can rank your pages, it needs to find them, crawl them, and decide to include them in its index. Each of these steps has potential failure points that are surprisingly common even on professionally built websites.
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A
robots.txtfile exists atyourdomain.com/robots.txtand is not accidentally blocking Googlebot from crawling important sections -
An XML sitemap exists and is referenced in
robots.txtand submitted to Google Search Console -
No important pages carry a
noindexmeta tag accidentally — especially common on staging sites that were copied to production - Google Search Console shows no significant crawl errors in the Coverage report
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For large sites (1,000+ pages): low-value pages (tag archives, filtered results, thin content) are excluded from crawling via
noindexorrobots.txtto preserve crawl budget
3. Core Web Vitals (CWV)
Core Web Vitals are Google's page experience signals — a set of measurable metrics that reflect how fast and stable your site feels to real users. Since the 2021 Page Experience update, CWV are a confirmed ranking factor. Check your scores at PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) using your real URL, not localhost.
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LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) under 2.5 seconds. LCP measures how quickly the largest visible element — usually your hero image or headline — loads. The biggest culprit is a large, uncompressed hero image. Solution: compress to WebP, serve via CDN, and add explicit width/height attributes to prevent layout shifts.
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INP (Interaction to Next Paint) under 200ms. INP replaced FID in 2024 and measures responsiveness to user interactions. Long JavaScript tasks on the main thread are the primary cause. Audit with Chrome DevTools Performance panel and defer non-critical scripts.
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CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) under 0.1. CLS measures visual stability — how much elements jump around as the page loads. The most common cause is images and embeds without explicit width/height dimensions. Also check for late-loading fonts and dynamically injected content.
Quick wins that improve all three: compress all images to WebP format, lazy-load below-the-fold images with the loading="lazy" attribute, minify CSS and JavaScript files, and preconnect to any third-party origins (Google Fonts, analytics, etc.) in your <head>.
4. URL Structure
Clean, logical URLs are easier for Google to understand and for users to share and remember. They're also a minor relevance signal — a URL that contains your target keyword performs slightly better than a string of numbers and random characters.
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URLs are short, descriptive, and lowercase — e.g.,
/local-seo-torontonot/Page?id=4823&cat=2 - Words are separated by hyphens, not underscores. Google treats hyphens as word separators; underscores join words together, making "local_seo" a single token.
- Trailing slashes are consistent sitewide — either always present or always absent. Mixed trailing slash usage creates duplicate content issues.
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Every page has a
rel="canonical"tag pointing to the preferred version of the URL
5. Structured Data (Schema)
Structured data is code (usually JSON-LD, embedded in a <script> tag in your HTML) that tells Google exactly what type of content is on each page. It doesn't directly boost rankings, but it enables rich results — star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs, business information — which increase click-through rates significantly.
- LocalBusiness schema on your homepage — essential for Canadian local businesses. Include name, address, phone, opening hours, and geographic coordinates.
- Organization schema sitewide, covering your logo, social profiles, and contact information
- BreadcrumbList schema on all inner pages — this enables breadcrumb rich results in search and helps Google understand your site hierarchy
- FAQPage schema on any page with a frequently asked questions section — generates FAQ dropdown rich results
- Article schema on all blog posts — date, author, headline, and publisher
Validate all structured data with Google's Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results). Fix any errors before publishing — invalid schema is worse than no schema.
6. Mobile Friendliness
Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning the mobile version of your site is what Google primarily crawls and ranks. If your mobile experience is broken, your rankings are broken — regardless of how good the desktop version looks.
- Site passes Google's Mobile-Friendly Test (search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly)
- All text is readable without pinching or zooming — body text should be at minimum 16px on mobile
- Tap targets (buttons, links, form fields) are at least 48x48 CSS pixels — smaller targets cause mis-taps and hurt UX signals
- No horizontal scrolling on any mobile viewport (320px minimum width)
7. Page Speed
Page speed is both a direct ranking factor and a conversion factor. A 1-second delay in mobile load time reduces conversions by up to 20% (Google/Deloitte, 2019). For Canadian businesses where most local searches happen on mobile, slow pages directly cost you revenue.
- Browser caching is enabled — static assets have appropriate cache headers (images, CSS, JS should be cached for at least 1 year if they use cache-busting filenames)
- Static assets are served via a CDN where possible — especially important for Canadian businesses serving customers across multiple provinces
- All images are compressed and served in WebP format — WebP files are typically 25–35% smaller than equivalent JPEGs
- CSS and JavaScript files are minified and concatenated where possible
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Non-critical JavaScript is deferred with
deferorasyncattributes to unblock page rendering
8. Internal Linking
Internal links serve two purposes: they help Google discover and understand your site's content hierarchy, and they pass PageRank from well-linked pages to less-linked pages. A well-structured internal link architecture can meaningfully lift the rankings of pages that have no external backlinks.
- Every important page is internally linked from at least one other page — orphan pages receive no PageRank and are harder for Google to discover
- No broken internal links — use the free version of Screaming Frog (up to 500 URLs) to crawl your site and check for 404 errors
- Anchor text is descriptive — linking to your local SEO page with "local SEO services" rather than "click here" tells Google exactly what the destination page is about
- Site architecture is shallow — most pages reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage. Deeply buried pages receive less crawl budget and less PageRank.
For Canadian businesses: Make sure your address, phone number, and province are consistent across every page of your website — not just the Contact page. Google uses this information to validate your local business data and improve your Maps ranking. If your footer shows one phone number and your contact page shows another, that's a NAP inconsistency that weakens your local SEO signals.
9. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content doesn't automatically result in a penalty — Google is generally good at identifying the "canonical" version of a page — but it does dilute ranking signals. When multiple URLs serve the same content, Google has to choose which one to rank, and it may choose the wrong one.
- No duplicate page titles or meta descriptions — every page should have unique, specific metadata
- www and non-www versions both resolve, with one permanently redirecting (301) to the other — pick one and stick with it
- URL parameters that generate duplicate or near-duplicate content (sorting, filtering, session IDs) are excluded from indexing via canonical tags or Google Search Console parameter handling
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Pagination is handled with canonical tags pointing to the root page, or with proper
rel="next"/rel="prev"tags for blog archives and product listings
10. Tracking and Measurement
You can't improve what you can't measure. Before you start any SEO campaign, make sure your measurement infrastructure is in place. Without it, you have no baseline, no way to attribute results, and no way to demonstrate ROI to stakeholders.
- Google Search Console is verified for your domain property and data is actively flowing — check the Performance report for impressions and clicks from organic search
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is installed and sending data. Note: Universal Analytics was sunset in July 2023. If you're still running UA, you've lost all your historical data collection.
- 404 errors are being monitored — either through Search Console's Coverage report or a third-party uptime monitoring tool
- Key conversions are tracked as events in GA4: form submissions, phone number clicks, and any other actions that represent business value
What to Do With This Checklist
This checklist covers the major technical SEO foundations. Start at the top and work down — security and crawlability issues are the most impactful and should always be fixed first. Core Web Vitals and structured data improvements will follow.
If you've worked through the checklist and want a professional second opinion — or if you've found issues you need help diagnosing and fixing — that's exactly what we do. A technical SEO audit will tell you not just what the issues are, but the order to fix them in for maximum ranking impact.
For a broader SEO strategy for your Canadian business — content, links, and local — see our SEO services.