The technical SEO audit checklist that actually gets shipped

Band 1 — indexability, before anything else

Nothing else matters if the page cannot be indexed. Confirm robots directives, canonical targets, HTTP status codes, and that every important URL appears in a valid sitemap.

• Unintentional noindex or robots blocks on commercial pages
• Canonicals pointing at redirects, parameters or the wrong locale
• 4xx and 5xx URLs that still receive internal links
• Sitemap entries that redirect or 404

Band 2 — crawl and rendering

For any JavaScript-heavy site, audit with a renderer. A plain fetch of a hydrated app reports empty headings and missing copy that are actually present for users, and the resulting 'fixes' are noise.

Band 3 — on-page signals

This is where most measurable movement comes from, and it is the easiest band to hand over as finished text: titles inside their character range, meta descriptions that read as complete sentences, exactly one H1 per page, and internal links using descriptive anchors.

Band 4 — performance and Core Web Vitals

Use field data rather than lab scores where you can, and treat LCP as the priority metric. Fix the largest element on your highest-traffic templates before chasing site-wide averages.

The handoff format that gets shipped

Group fix instructions once per issue type and reference them per page, rather than repeating the same paragraph on every row. Include the current value, the replacement value and the URL. Then re-run the same set after deployment so passing pages fall off the list and progress is visible.