Running a technical SEO audit

A technical audit answers one question: is anything stopping search engines from finding, understanding and showing the pages that matter? It is not a list of every warning a tool can produce.

Tools for a free audit

• Google Search Console: Google's own data on indexing, crawling, Core Web Vitals, security and manual actions.
• A crawler: Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) shows status codes, redirects, titles, canonicals, noindex rules and internal links across the site.
• The SEO-L page inspector: one URL at a time, showing status, redirect chain, robots.txt verdict, canonical, hreflang and structured data.
• PageSpeed Insights: field and lab performance data for key templates.
• Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator: structured data.

The audit order

Work from access to quality. Problems early in the list make later ones irrelevant.

1. Can Google crawl it?
   • robots.txt: no blocked important sections, CSS or JavaScript.
   • Server: no 5xx errors and acceptable response times (Crawl stats report).
2. Can Google index it?
   • Page indexing report: are important pages indexed, and are exclusions intended?
   • noindex only where intended. Important pages return 200.
   • Canonicals point to the right URLs, and Google agrees (URL Inspection).
3. One version of each page
   • HTTPS everywhere, one host, single-hop redirects.
   • No unnecessary duplicate URLs from parameters or filters.
4. Discoverability
   • Sitemap clean and submitted.
   • Important pages linked internally. No broken internal links. Reasonable crawl depth.
5. Rendering and mobile
   • Important content in the HTML or reliably rendered. Mobile version equivalent.
6. Experience
   • Core Web Vitals field data for key templates.
7. Enhancements
   • Structured data valid and matching the content. hreflang correct, if relevant.
   • Security issues and manual actions: none.

Prioritise

For each finding, ask:

• Impact: does it affect important pages, or many pages? Does it block indexing, or just add a little inefficiency?
• Effort: a one-line robots.txt fix, or a theme rewrite?
• Confidence: is it documented as a problem, or only a tool's opinion?

Severity in the Issues tab should reflect impact. A site-wide noindex is critical. 40 images without alt text are medium. A tool warning about meta description length is usually low.

Track until verified

Record each problem in the Issues tab of your Workspace project:

1. Open: found, with example URLs and how it was found.
2. In progress: someone is working on it.
3. Fixed, not verified: the change is live.
4. Fixed and verified: confirmed by a recrawl, URL Inspection, or Search Console's "Validate fix".

Search Console's Validate fix button, in reports such as Page indexing, asks Google to recheck the affected URLs and reports progress. It can take days to weeks.

Report honestly

A one-page summary that a business owner can act on beats a 90-page export: what is wrong, why it matters, what to do first, and what has already been fixed.