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Amol Ghemud Published: February 19, 2026
Summary
Poor technical foundations silently drain every rupee spent on content and paid media, yet most agencies report on rankings and traffic while ignoring the infrastructure that makes both possible. The checklist that matters for growth leaders covers six areas: Core Web Vitals on mobile, crawlability and indexation ratios, schema markup for both SEO and GEO readiness, mobile conversion parity, internal linking architecture, and canonical tag hygiene. Technical SEO is not a one-time project but a monthly, quarterly, and annual cadence that prevents the slow degradation that only shows up in traffic reports after months of compounding damage.
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If your site isn’t technically sound, your marketing budget is leaking.
Your marketing team just published a brilliant content piece. It’s well-researched, GEO-optimized, and targets a high-intent keyword that your competitors rank for. Sixty days later, it’s not indexed. Or it’s indexed but takes 6 seconds to load on mobile. Or it’s loading fast, but Google can’t parse the structure because your schema markup is broken.
Technical SEO isn’t glamorous. Nobody builds a career posting LinkedIn updates about fixing canonical tags. But poor technical foundations silently undermine every rupee you spend on content, every ad dollar you invest in driving traffic, and every hour your team spends on strategy.
This article isn’t for developers. It’s for founders, CMOs, and marketing leaders who need to know what questions to ask and what answers are unacceptable.
Why Technical SEO Gets Neglected (And Why That’s Expensive)
Most agencies report on rankings and traffic. Few report on the technical infrastructure that enables rankings and traffic. It’s like a contractor showing you the paint job while the foundation cracks underneath.
Technical issues compound. A slow site doesn’t just lose visitors on that page. It signals to Google that your entire domain provides a poor experience, which drags down rankings across every page. A crawlability issue doesn’t just hide one page. It can prevent Google from discovering entire sections of your site. Missing schema markup doesn’t just cost you a featured snippet. It makes your content invisible to AI systems that increasingly determine visibility.
Here’s the uncomfortable reality: most agencies don’t have deep technical SEO expertise. They have content people who can run a Screaming Frog crawl and flag the obvious issues. That covers maybe 30% of what technical SEO actually involves.
You don’t need to understand HTTP status codes. You need to know what to ask your team and what the answers should look like. Here’s the checklist.
Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
What to ask: “What are our Core Web Vitals scores on mobile for our top 20 pages by traffic?”
Acceptable answer: All three metrics (Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1) pass on at least 75% of page loads.
Red flag answer: “Our desktop scores are good.” Desktop doesn’t matter for this conversation. Google uses mobile-first indexing. If your mobile scores are poor, your rankings suffer regardless of how fast the site loads on a laptop.
A page that loads in 5 seconds instead of 2 loses roughly 40% of visitors before they see your content. That’s 40% of your content investment evaporated before the headline renders. If you’re spending Rs 5L per month on content and your pages load slowly, you’re effectively burning Rs 2L per month on content nobody sees.
Crawlability and Indexation
What to ask: “How many pages on our site are indexed versus how many exist? Are there any crawl errors in Search Console?”
Acceptable answer: Indexed page count is within 10% of total published pages. Crawl errors are under 1% and are being actively resolved.
Red flag answer: “I’ll need to check.” If your team doesn’t know your indexation ratio off the top of their head, they’re not monitoring it. Which means crawl issues could be hiding content from Google for months without anyone noticing.
Check Google Search Console’s Pages report. If you have 500 published pages but only 300 are indexed, that means 200 pages of content you invested in creating are invisible to search. Common causes: incorrect robots.txt rules blocking crawlers, orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them, and duplicate content causing Google to choose one version and ignore the rest.
Schema Markup and Structured Data
What to ask: “Which schema types are implemented across our site, and do they validate without errors?”
Acceptable answer: Article schema on all blog posts, FAQ schema on relevant pages, Organization schema on the homepage, and Product or Service schema on commercial pages. All validated through Google’s Rich Results Test with zero errors.
Red flag answer: “We have a basic schema on the homepage.” That’s like having a business card for your company but not for any of your products or services. In 2026, schema markup isn’t just an SEO signal. It’s a GEO signal. AI systems use structured data to understand relationships among entities, verify facts, and decide what to cite. Missing schema means AI systems have to guess what your content is about. They’ll guess wrong or skip you entirely.
As we cover in our SEO vs GEO guide, companies that get cited by AI are the ones making their content machine-readable through structured data.
Mobile Experience
What to ask: “What percentage of our traffic comes from mobile, and what’s our mobile conversion rate versus desktop?”
Acceptable answer: The mobile conversion rate should be between 50% and 70% of the desktop conversion rate. If the gap is larger, the mobile experience has usability issues that are costing you conversions.
Red flag answer: “Mobile traffic is growing, but conversions are mostly desktop.” This isn’t a user preference problem. It’s a UX problem. Users research on mobile and would convert if the experience is good enough. A massive mobile-to-desktop conversion gap means your mobile site has friction: slow loading, unclickable buttons, forms that are painful to fill on a phone, and pop-ups that block content.
Internal Linking Architecture
What to ask: “Do our most important commercial pages have at least 10 internal links pointing to them? What’s our average click depth for key pages?”
Acceptable answer: Top commercial pages are reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage. Important pages have 15+ internal links from relevant contextual pages. No critical page is an orphan.
Red flag answer: “Our navigation links to all main pages.” Navigation links are the minimum, not the strategy. Internal linking is how you tell Google (and AI systems) which pages are most important and how topics relate to each other. A well-linked page gets more crawl budget, passes more authority, and ranks faster than an identical page with no internal links.
What to ask: “Are there any mixed content warnings or HTTP pages on our site?”
Acceptable answer: 100% HTTPS. No mixed content. The security certificate is current with auto-renewal enabled.
Red flag answer: This should never be a red flag in 2026. If any page on your site serves over HTTP, fix it today. Google has treated HTTPS as a ranking signal for years, and users see security warnings on non-HTTPS pages. This is table stakes, not optimization.
Canonical Tags and Duplicate Content
What to ask: “Do we have any pages competing with each other for the same keywords? Are all canonical tags correctly pointing to the preferred version?”
Acceptable answer: Canonical tags are correctly implemented on all pages. No keyword cannibalization between pages. URL parameters aren’t creating duplicate versions of pages.
Red flag answer: “We’ve seen some keyword cannibalization but it’s not a priority.” It should be. When two of your pages compete for the same keyword, Google splits authority between them. Neither ranks as well as a single consolidated page would. This is especially common on sites that have been publishing content for years without a keyword mapping strategy.
International and Hreflang (If Applicable)
What to ask: “If we serve multiple regions or languages, are hreflang tags correctly implemented?”
If you’re targeting India and the GCC market (as many upGrowth clients do), proper hreflang implementation ensures Google serves the right content to the right audience. Incorrect implementation can mean your India-focused content appears for UAE searches, and vice versa, confusing users and diluting your relevance signals.
The Quarterly Technical Audit Cadence
Technical SEO isn’t a one-time project. Sites change. Developers ship updates that accidentally break things. New content gets published without proper markup. CMS updates introduce new issues. Plugin updates conflict with existing configurations.
Monthly: Check Search Console for new crawl errors, indexation drops, and Core Web Vitals regressions. This takes 15 minutes and catches issues before they compound.
Quarterly: Run a full site crawl with a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Check for broken links, redirect chains, missing schema, orphan pages, and crawl depth issues. This takes 2-4 hours but prevents the slow degradation that kills organic performance.
Annually: Complete technical SEO audit including server response times, CDN configuration, JavaScript rendering (if applicable), and security audit. This is the deep inspection that catches architectural issues your monthly and quarterly checks miss.
If your agency or internal team can’t confidently and with data answer the questions on this checklist, you have a capability gap. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need a new agency. It might mean you need to hire technical SEO specialists or bring in a one-time audit from a team that specializes in technical SEO.
What you can’t afford is to assume everything is fine because the site loads and rankings haven’t dropped yet. Technical debt accumulates silently. By the time it shows up in your traffic reports, you’ve already lost months of potential performance.
What to Do This Week?
Open Google Search Console. Check two things. First, the Pages report: Are more than 90% of your published pages indexed? Second, the Core Web Vitals report: are your mobile scores passing?
If both are green, you have a solid foundation. If either has issues, that’s your highest-priority fix before investing in more content or paid media.
If you want a comprehensive technical audit, including crawlability analysis, schema validation, site speed optimization, and GEO readiness assessment, book a technical SEO audit with our team. We’ll give you a prioritized list of fixes ranked by revenue impact.
FAQs
1. What is a technical SEO checklist?
A technical SEO checklist is a structured set of audits that ensures your website can be crawled, indexed, and ranked properly. It covers performance (Core Web Vitals), crawlability, indexation, schema markup, internal linking, security, canonicalization, and mobile usability.
2. How often should a technical SEO audit be done?
Growth-stage companies should review Search Console monthly, run a crawl-based audit quarterly, and conduct a deep technical SEO audit annually. Technical issues can occur at any time due to CMS updates, new content, or developer releases.
3. What are the most important technical SEO factors in 2026?
In 2026, the biggest technical SEO priorities are Core Web Vitals, mobile-first performance, crawl efficiency, structured data/schema, clean site architecture, and GEO-readiness (making content machine-readable for AI search systems).
4. How do Core Web Vitals impact SEO rankings?
Core Web Vitals influence rankings by signaling the quality of the user experience. Poor scores increase bounce rates, reduce engagement, and send negative signals to Google. Slow mobile performance can drag down rankings across the entire domain, not just on a single page.
5. Why is schema markup important for SEO and GEO?
Schema markup helps search engines and AI systems understand what your content represents (articles, services, FAQs, organizations). Without a schema, Google and AI models may misinterpret your pages or skip them, reducing visibility in rich results and AI-generated answers.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
