When starting a new SEO project or taking a fresh look at an existing project, it can be hard to know where to start. That's why we've decided to share our in-house checklist to save you the trouble of making your own and to help you avoid missing the important aspects along the way.

The following steps can be used for a comprehensive technical review and to help generate a plan of action to fix problems on most websites. Of course each website is different, but we intentionally made this checklist generic, so it should be applicable to most sites you come across.

Index

1. Review # of indexed pages

• The most accurate method to determine the number of indexed URLs (HTML not images) in Google is to view the Google Search Console Index Status Report. This report excludes URLs that are considered duplicate, non-canonical or have a meta noindex tag. You can also see the number of URLs that Google is aware of, but can not reach because they are blocked by Robots.txt.
  
  
• Download the Chart Data for future reference.
• Review the number of pages indexed, ideally the number will be climbing as new content is added. URLs indexed will fluctuate, especially on larger sites as Google changes their algorithm and/or other factors change. Note: The site in the screen shot above has over 30,000 URLs, but Google only wants to index approximately 6,000.
• The second most accurate method is to do a site:www.yourdomain.com search at Google. The value between what Google Search Console reports, and the number of results reported back from site:www.yourdomain.com searches will vary, sometimes gr...