A technical SEO audit checklist is the list of checks that tells you whether search engines can find, crawl, render and index your pages without trouble. It covers the plumbing under your content: robots rules, sitemaps, status codes, canonical tags, page speed, mobile layout, structured data and redirects. If any of those are broken, good content can sit on your site for months and never rank.

We run the same checklist on every site before we touch keywords or copy. It takes a few days for a typical small business site and longer for large ecommerce catalogs. Below is what’s on it, the tools we use for each check, and how we decide what to fix first.

You can run most of these checks yourself with free tools. If you’d rather have someone do it, our free SEO audit covers the same ground and ends with a written list of fixes.

Before you start: get access to the right data

A technical audit built only on a crawler misses half the picture. The crawler shows what a bot can reach from your homepage. Google’s own reports show what Google actually found, chose to index and had trouble with.

  • Google Search Console. Owner or full user access, ideally on a domain property so it covers every subdomain and protocol.
  • Google Analytics 4. Read access, so you can see which pages earn organic traffic before you change anything on them.
  • A crawler. Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Sitebulb or a similar tool. The free version of Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 URLs, which covers many small sites.
  • CMS and hosting access. You’ll need it to read the robots.txt file, server redirects and caching settings.

Save a copy of the crawl and the Search Console exports on day one. They become your baseline, and you’ll compare against them after fixes go live.

1. Crawling: can search engines reach your pages?

Start with the front door. If Googlebot can’t reach a page, nothing else on this list matters for that page.

  • robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and read every Disallow line. Staging rules that block the whole site after launch are more common than you’d think.
  • Status codes. Crawl the site and filter for 4xx and 5xx responses. Fix broken internal links at the source instead of only adding redirects.
  • Redirect chains. Any link that hops through two or more redirects should point straight at the final URL.
  • Orphan pages. Compare the crawl against your XML sitemap and Search Console. Pages that exist but get no internal links are hard for crawlers to find and rarely rank.
  • Crawl depth. Important pages should sit within three or four clicks of the homepage.

Google’s documentation is clear that robots.txt controls crawling, not indexing. A blocked URL can still appear in results if other pages link to it. If you want a page out of the index, let it be crawled and use a noindex tag instead.

2. Indexing: is Google keeping the right pages?

The Page indexing report in Search Console lists every URL Google knows about and why each one is or isn’t indexed. Read the reasons, not just the totals.

  • Crawled, currently not indexed. Google saw the page and passed on it. Thin, duplicate or low-value pages usually land here.
  • Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Google found near-identical pages and picked one itself. Set canonicals so you make that choice.
  • Excluded by noindex tag. Check that every page here is meant to be hidden. Leftover noindex tags from a redesign are a classic cause of lost traffic.
  • Soft 404. The page returns a 200 code but looks empty or broken to Google. Fix the content or return a real 404 or 410.

Spot-check key pages with the URL Inspection tool. It shows the canonical Google picked, the last crawl date and whether the live page can be indexed.

3. Site structure, URLs and canonical tags

Clean structure helps crawlers and people at the same time. We look for a few specific problems.

  • One version of the site. HTTP, HTTPS, www and non-www should all resolve to a single version with one 301 redirect.
  • Self-referencing canonical tags on every indexable page, pointing to the exact URL you want ranked.
  • Parameter and filter URLs on ecommerce sites that create thousands of near-duplicate pages. These need canonicals, noindex rules or crawl controls.
  • Readable URLs with words, not IDs, and no unnecessary folder depth.
  • Breadcrumbs and hub pages that group related content, so link equity flows to the pages that sell.

4. Page speed and Core Web Vitals

Google measures real-user experience through three Core Web Vitals. According to Google’s web.dev guidance, a page passes when Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint is 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift is 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of visits.

Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console first, because it uses field data from real Chrome users. Then use PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse on the worst URL groups to find the cause.

  • Oversized hero images and images served without modern formats like WebP or AVIF.
  • Render-blocking scripts from chat widgets, tag managers and page builders.
  • Slow server response, often from cheap shared hosting or missing page caching.
  • Layout shift from ads, embeds or images without width and height set.
  • Heavy third-party scripts that delay every click and hurt INP.

Speed fixes often touch the theme and hosting, so they belong with whoever maintains the site. Our website speed service covers that side of the work.

5. Mobile and rendering

Google crawls and indexes with a smartphone user agent, so the mobile version of a page is the version that counts. Anything missing on mobile is missing for ranking purposes.

  • Content, headings and internal links on mobile should match desktop. Hidden tabs are fine if the content is in the HTML.
  • Tap targets and font sizes should be usable without zooming.
  • JavaScript-heavy pages should render their main content and links in the HTML Google sees. Compare the rendered HTML in URL Inspection against what you see in a browser.
  • Lazy-loaded content should load without needing a scroll or click from a real user.

6. Structured data

Schema markup helps search engines understand what a page is about and can make it eligible for rich results. We check that the markup is valid and that it matches what’s visible on the page.

  • Organization or LocalBusiness markup on the homepage or contact page, with a consistent name, address and phone number.
  • Product markup with price and availability on ecommerce product pages.
  • Article markup on blog posts, with author and date.
  • BreadcrumbList markup where breadcrumbs appear.

Test pages with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator. Then check the rich result reports in Search Console for errors across the whole site.

7. Sitemaps, hreflang and international setup

Your XML sitemap should list only indexable, canonical URLs that return a 200 code. Submit it in Search Console and compare the submitted count against the indexed count.

If you sell to more than one country or language, check hreflang tags for return links and correct language-region codes. Mistakes here can show UK visitors your US pages, or the reverse. Sites serving the US, UK and Australia with one English version usually don’t need hreflang at all.

8. Security, redirects and migration leftovers

  • A valid HTTPS certificate on every page, with no mixed-content warnings.
  • Old URLs from past redesigns redirecting to the closest matching live page, not all dumped on the homepage.
  • No staging or development subdomains open to crawlers.
  • No hacked spam pages. Search Console’s Security issues and Manual actions reports will flag the worst cases.

If you’re planning a platform change or redesign, run the audit before and after. Our website migration service uses the pre-launch crawl as a redirect map so rankings carry over.

How we decide what to fix first

An audit can produce hundreds of warnings. Most don’t matter. We sort every finding by two questions: how many important pages does it touch, and how much work is the fix?

  1. Blockers. Anything that stops key pages being crawled or indexed. Robots rules, stray noindex tags, broken canonicals, server errors.
  2. Revenue pages. Speed, mobile and indexing problems on service, product and category pages that already earn traffic or leads.
  3. Sitewide template fixes. One change in a theme file that cleans up thousands of pages at once.
  4. Housekeeping. Redirect chains, minor schema warnings and orphan pages.

Each fix goes into a written list with the URL, the problem, the fix and who owns it. That list becomes the work plan, and you re-crawl after each batch to confirm the change landed.

Get a technical audit without the spreadsheet work

If you’d rather not run this yourself, our SEO services start with this same technical audit. We send the findings in writing, fix the blockers on a staging copy you review, and report on progress every two weeks. For local businesses, pair it with our local SEO checklist, or start with a free SEO audit of your site.