Technical foundations
Make sure search engines can crawl and index the site: a working robots file and sitemap, no accidental noindex, clean URLs, HTTPS, and fast Core Web Vitals. A page that can't be crawled or loaded won't rank no matter how good the content is.
Content and intent
For each target query, have one page that genuinely answers it — matching the intent (informational, commercial, transactional), with a clear title, useful depth, and an honest answer near the top. Don't spread one topic thinly across many weak pages.
Authority and trust
Earn references from credible sites, keep your business information consistent everywhere, and show real expertise — named authors, sources, experience. These trust signals matter for ranking and for whether AI engines will cite you.
AI-search readiness
Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet (Google Search Central). Its guide to generative AI features treats this work as SEO and lists things you can skip for Google Search, such as llms.txt files and special markup (Google Search Central). So the checklist items above are the AI-search checklist for Google. Other engines run their own crawlers; how to get cited by AI search covers which ones to allow.
What should a paid technical SEO audit deliver?
A list of problems ranked by what they cost you, each tied to evidence you can open yourself. Most of that evidence lives in Search Console: the Page indexing report shows which pages Google has indexed and why others aren’t (Search Console Help), and the URL Inspection tool shows how Google sees a single page (Search Console Help).
A useful audit covers crawling and indexing of your money pages, redirects and broken links, duplicate or thin pages competing with each other, page speed on the templates that matter, and structured data errors. It ends with a short fix list: what to change, on which pages, who does it, and how you’ll confirm the fix in Search Console.
A long export of every warning a crawler tool can produce isn’t an audit. Ask which ten findings matter most and why. How to check your SEO or PPC vendor is working covers the monthly checks once fixes are in.
Do these first, in this order
A checklist without priority just spreads effort thin, so here's the sequence that actually pays. One — confirm your money pages aren't accidentally blocked by robots or a stray noindex, because that single bug wipes out everything else. Two — fix the page that already ranks on page two of search, since nudging it up returns more than launching something new. Three — match intent on your highest-value commercial pages before chasing volume on blog posts. Four — clean up internal links so your important pages aren't buried five clicks deep. Only after that does new content earn its place. Most teams do this backwards, writing posts while a noindex quietly sinks the homepage.
The items everyone gets wrong
A few checklist staples are done badly more often than not. Title tags get stuffed with keywords instead of written to earn the click. Alt text gets filled for "SEO" rather than describing the image, which helps no one and annoys screen-reader users. Pages get published targeting five keywords at once, then rank for none. And the classic — adding pages faster than you can keep them genuinely useful, until the site is mostly thin content dragging down the few good pages. More is not the goal. Fewer pages that each earn their keep beats a hundred that don't.
How to tell it's working
Rankings are a lagging, jumpy signal, so don't stare at them daily. Watch the earlier ones. Search Console impressions climbing means you're showing up for more queries even before clicks follow. Pages moving from the bottom of page two toward the top is the real momentum to track. New long-tail queries appearing in your reports show fresh content getting picked up. And for AI search, check directly — ask ChatGPT or Google's AI a question your page answers and see whether you're cited. If nothing's moved on any of these after a few months of real work, something's wrong, and "SEO takes time" stops being an excuse.