Technical SEO problems are uniquely damaging because they are invisible to the naked eye. Your site can look perfect to human visitors while Googlebot encounters errors, blocks, and dead ends on every crawl. A regular technical health check catches these problems before they compound into serious ranking damage. Here is the complete free process that covers everything that matters.

Quick Answer: A technical SEO health check covers six areas: indexability (can Google index your pages), crawlability (can Googlebot access your pages without errors), HTTPS security (is your SSL certificate valid), page speed (do your pages pass Core Web Vitals), internal linking (are there broken or orphaned pages), and your XML sitemap (is it current and error-free). The whole check takes under two hours using free tools.

Step 1: Check indexability — can Google index your pages?

  1. Open Google Search Console → Coverage
  2. Read the Excluded tab — every excluded URL with its reason
  3. Look specifically for: "Excluded by noindex tag", "Blocked by robots.txt", "Crawled — currently not indexed"
  4. Also search site:yourdomain.com in Google — the number of results shown is approximately your indexed page count

Red flags to fix immediately:

  • Important pages appearing in the excluded list unexpectedly
  • The site: search showing far fewer pages than you have published
  • Large numbers of pages marked as "Crawled — currently not indexed" (suggests thin content quality issues)

Step 2: Check crawlability — can Googlebot access your pages?

  1. Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser — confirm it does not contain Disallow: / (which blocks all crawlers)
  2. In Search Console, go to Settings → Crawl Stats — check for high proportions of server errors in the response codes breakdown
  3. Run our broken link checker on your domain — every 404 or 5xx error is a crawlability problem consuming crawl budget

Step 3: Check HTTPS security

  1. Run your domain through our SSL checker
  2. Confirm: certificate is valid, not expired, covers your domain correctly, and there are no mixed content warnings
  3. Confirm all HTTP pages redirect to HTTPS — search your domain with http:// and verify it redirects to https://
  4. Check Search Console Security Issues for any security alerts

An expired or misconfigured SSL certificate shows a browser warning that blocks most visitors from accessing your site at all.

Step 4: Check Core Web Vitals and page speed

  1. Go to Search Console → Experience → Core Web Vitals → Mobile tab
  2. Note any pages in the Poor or Needs Improvement categories
  3. Test your most important page templates with our speed tool
  4. Record your LCP, INP, and CLS scores — target: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1

Step 5: Check internal linking health

  1. Run our internal link checker on your domain
  2. Look for orphan pages — pages with zero internal links pointing to them
  3. Look for pages with very few internal links (one or two) that should be receiving more
  4. Check that your most important pages (homepage, key service pages, top-performing blog posts) are well-linked from relevant content

Step 6: Check your XML sitemap

  1. Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml — confirm it loads and contains your important pages
  2. In Search Console → Sitemaps, check the status of your submitted sitemap
  3. Compare Discovered URLs (in your sitemap) vs Indexed URLs — a large discrepancy indicates quality issues causing Google to exclude pages
  4. Confirm your sitemap contains no redirect URLs, noindexed pages, or 404s

Step 7: Check for manual actions and security issues

  1. Search Console → Security and Manual Actions → Manual Actions — should show "No issues detected"
  2. Search Console → Security and Manual Actions → Security Issues — should show "No issues detected"

Any entry in either of these reports requires immediate investigation — these are the most severe issues in the technical health check.

Step 8: Create a priority fix list

After completing all seven checks, list every issue you found and prioritise by severity:

  • Critical (fix today): Manual actions, security issues, noindex on important pages, robots.txt blocking Googlebot, broken HTTPS
  • High (fix this week): Server errors, broken internal links, Core Web Vitals failures on key pages
  • Medium (fix this month): Orphan pages, sitemap errors, slow page templates

Summary: Complete technical SEO health check

  • Step 1: Indexability — Search Console Coverage + site: operator
  • Step 2: Crawlability — robots.txt + Crawl Stats + our broken link checker
  • Step 3: HTTPS — our SSL checker + HTTP redirect confirmation
  • Step 4: Page speed — Search Console Core Web Vitals + our speed tool
  • Step 5: Internal links — our link checker for orphan pages
  • Step 6: Sitemap — sitemap.xml check + Search Console Sitemaps report
  • Step 7: Manual actions and security — Search Console Security and Manual Actions
  • Step 8: Prioritise all issues found by severity and fix in order

Continue reading: How do I get my website to appear in Google's answer boxes?