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 website's. 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

• You can't rank a page if it's not in the search engine index, therefore the 1st step is to review if and how completely the site is getting indexed. The most accurate method to determine the number of indexed URLs (HTML not images) in Google is to view the Google Search Console Page Indexing Report. Note that the Discovered URLs value is how many URLs are in the sitemap, including all child sitemaps. That value is not necessarily how many URLs are actually indexed in the search engine.
  
  
  
  To see the total number of indexed pages, you'll need to view the Index > Pages report.

  

  This shows how many total URLs are available for potential display in the Google search index. Ideally, the number of Discovered URLs in the sitemap and the number of Valid URLs are similar. If you see a big difference, that's an early indication of a problem.

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