A checklist earns its length. Each item should be detectable without guessing, explainable to somebody with no SEO vocabulary, and worth a developer's afternoon. Items that fail those tests belong in an investigation, not in a monthly routine.
Silent and expensive: check every month
- Indexability of the money templatesA noindex left behind after a launch removes a section from search results with nothing on the page looking wrong. Check the templates that earn, not a sample of the site.
- Canonicals pointing where you thinkIncluding the disagreement case, where the HTML says one URL and a response header says another. Google resolves that for you and does not tell you which it picked.
- Redirect chains and loopsLoops never load for anyone. Chains accumulate across migrations, and each hop was reasonable when someone added it.
- Server errors and blocked responsesIncluding the ones that only appear for crawlers, which are usually a firewall rule rather than a broken application.
Costs traffic quietly: check monthly, act by template
- Titles and descriptions across templatesMissing and duplicated, both. These are nearly always one component, and the count in an audit export tells you the site's size rather than the size of the job.
- Thin and duplicated content at pattern levelA single short page is fine. A generated template of short pages is a decision somebody made once.
- Internal links to broken pagesThe link is the defect, not the target. Fix the link rather than adding a redirect for it to lean on.
- Response time to first byteA different problem from a Core Web Vitals score, with different fixes. Slow responses cost you crawl coverage before they cost you visitors.
Worth knowing, rarely urgent
- Structured data on types that still earn a rich resultThe list changes. FAQ markup no longer earns one for most sites, so implementing it now is work with no return.
- Heading structure and alt textAccessibility findings first, search findings second. The same fix serves both, which is the reason they are on the list at all.
- Orphans and depthMost interesting when a page is in the sitemap and linked from nowhere, which is a site contradicting itself about what matters.
The item most checklists are missing
Check that last month's fixes are still fixed. Regression is the most common way a site loses ground, it is invisible in a fresh audit, and it takes one comparison against the previous crawl to catch.
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