A technical SEO checklist for corporate websites

Technical SEO is the infrastructure work that lets search engines crawl your site smoothly, index the right pages and match each piece of content to one clear URL. On corporate sites the most common problems are multilingual setup, duplicate URLs, slow pages and old URLs that disappear during a redesign. The checklist below summarises what we review in an audit or before a new site goes live.

Crawlability and indexation

First, check whether search engines can reach your pages and what they see when they do.

• Status codes: live pages return 200, removed pages 404 or 410, moved pages 301. Pages that show "not found" but return 200 (soft 404s) should be fixed.
• robots.txt: block only areas you do not want crawled, such as the admin panel or internal search results. robots.txt blocks crawling, not indexing; to keep a page out of the index use noindex and allow it to be crawled.
• Leftover noindex: noindex tags carried over from staging are among the most common and most costly launch mistakes.
• Server-rendered content: headings, service descriptions and key text should be in the HTML without depending on JavaScript.
• XML sitemaps: include only canonical, indexable URLs that return 200, with lastmod reflecting real updates. On larger sites, splitting sitemaps by pages, services, projects and articles makes monitoring easier.

Canonicals and hreflang

Every piece of content needs one canonical URL. HTTP and HTTPS, www and non-www, trailing-slash and non-trailing-slash versions should all redirect to a single form, and each page should carry a self-referencing canonical. Campaign parameters such as utm should not behave like new pages.

On multilingual sites, hreflang links each language version to the others. Each page must list itself, links must be reciprocal, language codes must be correct, and an x-default should be defined. Prefer clear path structures such as /tr/ and /en/; switching language only by cookie or query parameter creates ambiguity for search engines.

Structured data and internal linking

Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, Service, Article and, where appropriate, FAQPage markup tells machines what a page is about. The rule is simple: markup must describe only what is visible on the page, with no invented reviews or ratings. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.

Internal links show which pages matter and how topics connect. Link from service pages to related projects and articles, and from articles back to services, using descriptive anchor text. Leave no orphan pages.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals measure real user experience with three metrics. Google's "good" thresholds are:

1. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): 2.5 seconds or less. Optimising the hero image, serving it at the right size in a modern format and preloading it where needed is usually the biggest win.
2. INP (Interaction to Next Paint): 200 milliseconds or less. Reduce heavy JavaScript and break up long tasks.
3. CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): 0.1 or less. Reserve space for images and embeds and control font loading.

Lab tests are a guide, but assessment is based on real-user field data, so follow the Search Console report.

Redirects during a relaunch

A new design or URL structure is the most common way to lose accumulated search visibility. To prevent it:

• Before launch, list every URL on the old site (from a crawl, sitemaps, analytics and Search Console).
• Map each old URL to its closest new equivalent by content; do not send everything to the homepage.
• Use 301s for permanent moves and avoid redirect chains and loops.
• After launch, watch 404 reports and index coverage closely, and keep redirects in place for the long term.

How Grafikare approaches it

We start with a technical audit and prioritise findings by impact and risk. For a new site we prepare the URL map and redirect plan during design and verify it on staging before launch. After launch we monitor Search Console and field data and close the remaining issues.