Mate of mine in Hawthorn runs an accounting practice. Launched a new site last September. Beautiful thing, paid nine grand for it. Fortnight after the launch I’m in his kitchen, ask him to pull up Search Console. He stares at me. Doesn’t have one. The agency never set it up.
Crawled it that night out of curiosity. Half his pages were tagged noindex. Some dev pushed staging to production and nobody noticed. Nine grand on a website that may as well not exist. He was filthy.
Happens way more than you’d think. Below is the list I run through every time someone asks me to look at their new site. Twenty items, in roughly the order I’d do them.
Why New Sites Get This Wrong
Quick context. Backlinko’s analysis cited in 6S Marketers’ 2026 technical guide reckons proper technical optimisation lifts organic traffic by 30 percent on average. Then Logos Web Designs’ breakdown of Google’s March 2026 update has only 33 percent of websites passing all three Core Web Vitals. Two thirds flunking the basics. Tick off a checklist and you’re past most of your competition.
Crawling and Indexing
1. Read your robots.txt. Just open it. yoursite.com/robots.txt, hit enter. See Disallow: / anywhere? You’re invisible. Sounds too simple to mention. Promise it isn’t. The Hawthorn job above, same root cause.
2. Sitemap to Search Console. Your CMS probably generates one (WordPress with Yoast does, Shopify does, Webflow does). Still have to actually submit it. Digital Applied’s 200 item technical audit calls crawl and index hygiene the most common source of ranking issues in 2026.
3. Verify Search Console at the domain level, not URL prefix. Domain catches every subdomain and protocol variant in one go.
4. Hunt down stray noindex tags. WordPress has a tickbox under Settings then Reading called “discourage search engines from indexing this site”. Devs flick it on while building, forget. Untick. Then crawl with Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) to make sure nothing else got tagged accidentally.
5. Canonical tags on everything. Tells Google which version is boss when there are duplicates. Skip them and ranking signals split across URLs and you rank for nothing. A proper seo audit melbourne spots canonical messes inside the first hour.
6. Kill redirect chains. And 404s. Crawl, anything returning 404 or hopping through more than one redirect, fix it. Crawl budget is finite.
Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
7. LCP under 2.5 seconds. Largest Contentful Paint, time for the main visible thing to show up. Here’s the bit that should make you sit up. Digital Applied’s page speed statistics peg every 100ms of load time at roughly 1 percent in conversions. Shave from 4 seconds to 2 and that’s a 20 percent uplift. Without touching your offer.
8. INP under 200ms. Interaction to Next Paint. Replaced FID in 2024, Google now weights it the same as LCP after the March 2026 update. Heavy JavaScript usually breaks it. Strip the chat widget you forgot. The two analytics tags you stacked. The popup library nobody uses.
9. CLS under 0.1. Cumulative Layout Shift, technical name for “your page jumps around while loading and customers tap the wrong thing”. Set explicit width and height on every image. Reserve space for ads or embeds.
10. Image work. Compress, lazy load, convert to WebP or AVIF. PNG is fine for icons, that’s about it. TinyPNG or Squoosh shave 60 to 80 percent off image weight and you cannot see the difference. NitroPack’s Core Web Vitals research has cases where image fixes alone dropped bounce rates by 43 percent.
11. Hosting. $4 a month shared hosting won’t pass Core Web Vitals on anything content heavy. Server taking more than 600ms to respond, your LCP is cooked. Good website speed optimisation earns its money fastest here, because hosting is almost always the actual bottleneck.
On Page Foundations
12. One H1 per page. Just one. About the page, not your business. Most CMS themes drop your logo or company name in an H1 by accident. Fix it.
13. Titles and metas. Title tags under 60 characters, target keyword toward the start. Meta descriptions under 155 characters, written like ad copy because that’s what they are. People treat metas as an afterthought then wonder why their CTR is one percent.
14. Internal linking that does something. Every page that matters should be three clicks or fewer from the homepage. Anchor text descriptive. “Click here” is useless. “Melbourne tax accountant for sole traders” tells Google what the linked page is about.
15. Schema markup. LocalBusiness for service businesses, Article for blogs, FAQ on pages with FAQs. The HOTH’s 2026 technical checklist reckons schema is now how AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity decide who to cite. Skip it and you opt out of the AI search era.
Trust, Tracking and Local
16. HTTPS sitewide, zero mixed content. SSL active, every internal link using https. Mixed content warnings make your site look broken and Google clocks it.
17. Mobile usability, properly. Over 60 percent of searches are mobile per NoGood’s 2026 technical breakdown, so test on an actual phone. Not your browser’s responsive view. Tap targets, font sizes, scroll behaviour, the lot.
18. Google Business Profile. For any local business, non negotiable. Every field filled, decent photos, ask happy customers for reviews. Alt Media’s 2026 small business SEO checklist reckons GBP is still the biggest lever for local visibility in 2026.
19. GA4 with proper conversion events. Pageviews on their own are useless. Set up events for form submissions, phone calls, bookings, whatever counts as money. Can’t tell which traffic source converts? You’re guessing.
20. Run a baseline audit before optimising anything. Saving the obvious one for last but I see this skipped constantly. Decent technical seo services melbourne shops give you a prioritised fix list, not a 200 page PDF nobody opens. DIY first pass with Screaming Frog plus PageSpeed Insights plus Search Console gets 70 percent of the way. Last 30 is judgement, where paid seo audit services melbourne earn their fees.
One last thing. Site built with Wix’s AI builder or one of the GPT site generators? Run this checklist twice. DebugBear’s 2026 technical guide covers it but the short version, those tools spit out broken schema, missing alt text, and JavaScript bloat that destroys Core Web Vitals.
For more on the conversion side once the technical side is sorted, take a look at how we build high-performing sites in our website work and how we run tracking-driven campaigns in our Google Ads work.
Key Takeaways
Most new sites ship with five or six fixable SEO problems baked in. The 20 above split into four buckets. Crawling and indexing first, since Google can’t rank what it can’t see. Speed and Core Web Vitals next, two thirds of sites flunk these and you leapfrog the lot just by passing. Then on page stuff, schema and metas and internal links. Then trust, mobile, GBP, tracking. Tackle in that order. Don’t skip the audit. You can’t fix what you haven’t measured.
Frequently Asked Questions
Small site under 50 pages, two or three days if you know what you’re doing. Bigger or messier site, allow a week. The audit usually surfaces another week of stuff you didn’t know was broken.
Most of it’s doable with free tools and a bit of YouTube. The bits that catch people out are schema, JavaScript optimisation, and Core Web Vitals work. Budget under $1,500 a month, do the easy stuff yourself and pay for an audit to catch what you’ve missed.
Brand new site, item 1, no question. Make sure Google can crawl and index you. Doesn’t matter how clever your content is if your robots.txt is shut. After that, Core Web Vitals give the biggest visible lift fastest.
Established site, every six months. Actively launching pages or doing big design changes, every three. Plugins, theme updates, content migrations all break things quietly.
Nope. Technical SEO is necessary, not sufficient. You still need content matching what people search, local relevance, ideally backlinks. But without the technical foundation, none of that other stuff works.
