A technical SEO audit checklist

A technical SEO audit answers one question: can search engines find, read and trust your pages? Run it before you spend money on content or links. A site with technical problems wastes both.

You do not need to be a developer to start. Most of this checklist can be done with Google Search Console, a crawler such as Screaming Frog and a browser.

1. Can search engines crawl the site?

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Make sure it does not block pages or folders you want in search. A leftover Disallow: / from a staging site is more common than you would think.
Check that your XML sitemap exists, is listed in Search Console and only contains pages you want indexed: real pages that return a 200 status.
Crawl the site and look for pages that nothing links to. Orphan pages are hard for search engines to find.

2. Are the right pages indexed?

In Search Console, open the page indexing report. Read the reasons pages are excluded, such as “Crawled, currently not indexed” or “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”.
Search site:yoursite.com for a rough check. Large gaps between what you expect and what appears are worth investigating.
Look for pages that should not be indexed but are: internal search results, filter combinations, thank-you pages, test pages.
Check that important pages do not carry a noindex tag by mistake.

3. Is each URL clean and singular?

Every page should have a self-referencing canonical tag, or point to the preferred version if there are duplicates.
Pick one version of the site: https, with or without www. The others should redirect to it with a single 301.
Look for redirect chains and loops. A to B to C should be A to C.
Fix internal links that point to redirected or broken pages.
Find 404s and decide: redirect to a close match, or leave as a 404 if the page is gone for good.

4. Is the site fast?

Run key templates through PageSpeed Insights: home page, a category or service page, an article, a product page.
Look at the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for real user data. It shows which groups of URLs are slow.
Common fixes: compress and resize images, serve modern formats, defer scripts that are not needed immediately, reserve space for images and ads so the layout does not jump.
Heavy plugins, apps and tracking scripts are the usual cause on WordPress and Shopify.

5. Does it work on mobile?

Open the site on a real phone. Check that text is readable, buttons are tappable and nothing is cut off.
Make sure the mobile page has the same content as the desktop page, since Google uses the mobile version for indexing.

6. Is the content marked up clearly?

One h1 per page, with headings that follow a logical order.
Unique title tags and meta descriptions, written for people.
Descriptive alt text on meaningful images.
Structured data where it fits, such as Organization, Article, Product or LocalBusiness. Validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test.

7. Is it secure and stable?

The whole site runs on https, with no mixed content warnings.
The SSL certificate is valid and renews automatically.
The server responds reliably. Check for frequent 5xx errors in Search Console’s crawl stats.

8. If you have several languages or regions

Use hreflang tags so each version points to its counterparts, and make them reciprocal.
Keep each language on its own URL. Do not switch language by cookie alone.

How to prioritise

Do not try to fix everything. Sort findings by impact and effort.

First: anything that blocks crawling or indexing of important pages. These stop everything else from working. Second: problems on pages that already earn traffic or revenue, such as slow templates and broken redirects. Third: tidy-ups like missing alt text or long title tags.

Write each issue down with the affected URLs, why it matters and the fix. A list like that is easier to hand to a developer than a 90-page export.

If you would rather have someone else run the audit and fix what it finds, that is what our technical SEO service is for.