Technical SEO Audits
Technical SEO Audit
A technical SEO audit is a complete check of a website's internal architecture, code and performance. This is done to ensure it can be efficiently crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines.
How can this help your SEO prospects?
Crawlability and indexability- Checks include: Robots.txt (blocking/unblocking important pages), sitemap.xml structure and submission to Google Search Console, crawl depth (how many clicks away pages are) and canonical tags (preventing duplicate content issues). If bots such as googlebot, can’t crawl your content then there is a 0% chance of your content (even if it is amazing) being crawled or indexed. So these checks are extremely necessary to ensure that a technically non-optimised site does not take away from other SEO efforts.
Site architecture and internal linking- Checks include: Logical hierarchy of pages, orphan pages (pages with no internal links), use of breadcrumbs and anchor text consistency. Fixing these and gaining a clean structure helps search engines understand and evaluate relationships between content, this helps spread link equity and boosts topical authority. This is particularly important with new developments in NLP (natural language processing.)
Page speed & core web vitals- Checks include: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), FID/INP (First Input Delay / Interaction to Next Paint) and image compression, lazy loading, caching. Google rewards sites that load fast and feel smooth, especially on mobile. Slow, sites get penalised, in terms of ranking and E.E.A.T signals.
Mobile-friendliness & responsive design- Checks include:responsive CSS frameworks, mobile usability reports in Search Console and intrusive popups on mobile. Often google will rank using the mobile version of a site and so having a mobile friendly site is extremely important (particularly if that is the way the site is most commonly used.)
HTTPS and security- Checks include: SSL certificate active (HTTPS) and whether there are mixed-content errors (HTTPS + HTTP elements). Security is a ranking signal. Google explicitly favours HTTPS sites.
Structured data & schema markup- Checks include: schema for articles, products, local business, FAQs, reviews, etc and validation with Google’s Rich Results Test. Schema helps generate rich snippets (stars, FAQs, product info) which boost visibility in SERPs.
Technical errors and broken elements- Checks include: 404 errors and broken links, redirect errors and JavaScript rendering issues. Because a broken user experience means wasted crawl budget and poor user signals (bounce rate, time on site), rankings will be largely hurt.