01Separate access from ranking
A technical review begins by checking whether the intended pages can be fetched, rendered and considered for indexing. Review status codes, robots directives, canonicals and sitemap entries together. A page can return 200 and still be noindex; a URL in a sitemap can still redirect elsewhere.
Indexability is a prerequisite rather than a promise of search performance. The business still needs useful pages that match its audience’s questions. Google’s SEO Starter Guide describes the foundations without a guaranteed ranking formula.
02Review structure and important templates
Map how visitors and crawlers reach service, product and article pages. Check descriptive internal links, breadcrumbs, pagination and duplicated parameter URLs. Review representative templates as well as individual important pages; a shared defect can affect a large part of the site.
For a store, examine product variations, filtering and category paths. For a content library, examine archives, obsolete articles and orphan pages. The recommendations should follow the actual website rather than copy a generic checklist into a report.
03Measure performance in context
Use lab tests to diagnose a page under recorded conditions and available field data to understand real-user experience. Distinguish LCP, INP and CLS from a single Lighthouse score. Review images, scripts, fonts, caching and server behaviour according to the measured bottleneck.
Do not remove useful content merely to improve a score. A fast page with an unclear offer can still fail customers. See our site review checklist for the wider journey and migration considerations.