Technical SEO

Your Site Must Be Indexable

It is essential that your site can be found and crawled by search engines. This sounds reasonable enough but sometimes this can be accidentally prevented from happening by your robots.txt file.

To make sure your site and all of its pages are indexed, you'll want to:
- submit your XML sitemap to search engines
- look over and possibly edit the robots.txt file
- confirm there are no other issues in Google Search Console such as improper canonical tags.

Logical Site Structure

Be sure to use a clear and logical site structure with the proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3,...).

This chrome extension from Detailed makes it really easy to check heading tags.

Mobile Friendliness

More searches are performed on mobile devices than on desktops in most areas so it is critical that your website is mobile friendly and has responsive design (ensuring that a website renders well and is user friendly regardless of screen size or resolution). It's understandable that mobile friendliness is a ranking factor.

No URL Errors or Broken Links

It is easy to make a coding mistake (particularly on a large site) and end up with links that are incorrect or that link to content that is no longer there. Not only does this send a bad message to search engines and will negatively affect your rankings but it also negates your hard work in acquiring those coveted  backlinks.
For instance, consider these 2 website pages:
website.com/page1
website.com/page1/
In the eyes of Google, they are seen as 2 completely different pages.
A simple mistake of adding or leaving off a "/" could cost you a lot of traffic and therefore rankings.

Fast Page Speed

It has been shown time and time again that faster loading pages generally rank better than slow ones and besides, we know that Google's Core Web Vitals initiative is a ranking factor. Optimize your images & code and use a CDN if necessary.

Here is a great site to test your speed.

Schema Markup

Google recommends using structured data like schema markup to help them better understand your content. 

It is advised to have a developer code your schema markup. However, an easy way to see what you currently have is to use a schema validator like this one from schema.org.