Technical SEO Audit: How to Find and Fix What Holds Your Site Back

Great content can’t rank if search engines struggle to crawl, render or index it. A technical SEO audit finds the hidden problems — blocked pages, broken links, slow templates, duplicate URLs — that quietly limit your rankings.

This is the audit process I use for client websites. You can follow most of it with free tools.

Tools you’ll need

• Google Search Console — indexing, Core Web Vitals and errors straight from Google.
• A crawler such as Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) to see your site the way a search engine does.
• PageSpeed Insights for speed and Core Web Vitals.
• Google’s Rich Results Test for structured data.

Step 1: Crawlability

Search engines must be able to reach your pages.

• Check robots.txt isn’t blocking important sections, CSS or JavaScript.
• Crawl the site and look for pages returning 4xx or 5xx errors.
• Find orphan pages — important pages with no internal links pointing to them.
• Make sure navigation links are real HTML links, not JavaScript-only buttons.

Step 2: Indexing

Being crawlable isn’t the same as being indexed.

• Open the Pages report in Search Console and review the reasons pages aren’t indexed.
• Look for accidental noindex tags on pages that should rank.
• Check canonical tags point to the correct version of each page.
• Make sure thin or duplicate pages (tag archives, filtered URLs, test pages) aren’t diluting your site.

Step 3: Site structure and URLs

• Important pages should be reachable within about three clicks from the homepage.
• URLs should be short, descriptive and consistent — one version only (HTTPS, with or without www, with or without a trailing slash).
• Use breadcrumbs and logical categories to show how pages relate.

Step 4: Redirects and broken links

• Replace internal links that point to redirects with direct links to the final URL.
• Fix redirect chains (A → B → C) and loops.
• Repair or redirect broken internal and external links.
• After a redesign, confirm every old URL redirects to its best equivalent — see how to redesign without losing SEO.

Step 5: Speed and Core Web Vitals

Check LCP, INP and CLS in PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report. Focus on page templates (homepage, service pages, blog posts) rather than individual URLs — fixing one template fixes every page that uses it. My Core Web Vitals guide explains the fixes.

Step 6: Mobile experience

Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Test key pages on real phones: readable text, tappable buttons, no horizontal scrolling and no content hidden on mobile that exists on desktop.

Step 7: Structured data

Validate your Schema.org markup (Organization or Person, Service, Article, Breadcrumb, FAQ) with the Rich Results Test and fix errors and warnings. Structured data helps search engines understand your content and can enable richer search results.

Step 8: On-page technical elements

• Every indexable page has a unique title tag and meta description.
• One H1 per page and a logical heading hierarchy.
• Images have alt text, sensible file sizes and modern formats.
• XML sitemap contains only indexable, canonical URLs and is submitted in Search Console.

Step 9: Security and HTTPS

All pages should load over HTTPS without mixed-content warnings, and HTTP should redirect permanently to HTTPS. Search Console’s Security Issues report should be empty.

How to prioritise the fixes

Priority	Examples
Critical	Important pages blocked, noindexed or returning errors
High	Missing redirects, duplicate content, poor Core Web Vitals on key templates
Medium	Redirect chains, missing structured data, thin pages
Low	Minor title length issues, small image optimisations

Fix critical issues immediately, then work through the list. Re-crawl after each round of changes.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I run a technical SEO audit?

A full audit once or twice a year, plus a quick check after any redesign, migration or major plugin change. Monitor Search Console monthly in between.

Can I do a technical SEO audit myself?

You can find many issues with the tools above. Interpreting them and fixing templates, redirects or performance problems often needs a developer.

What’s the difference between a technical audit and a content audit?

A technical audit checks whether search engines can access and understand your site. A content audit checks whether your pages answer searchers’ needs better than competitors’. You need both.

Want an expert audit with the fixes included?

I’m both an SEO specialist and a developer, so I don’t just report problems — I fix them. Learn more about my SEO services, or request a technical SEO audit.