Guide
What a technical SEO audit is and when to run one
A technical SEO audit checks whether Google and AI engines can crawl, render, index and understand your site. Before investing in content or links, confirm that the technical foundation lets that effort through.
Run one at least twice a year, before and after a migration, whenever organic traffic drops without a clear cause and every time the CMS or frontend framework changes.
The 5 areas the checklist covers
The 25 points are grouped into five areas, each with five controls and a criticality level so you can prioritize by impact.
1. Indexing and crawling
One canonical version of the domain, a robots.txt without accidental blocks, an XML sitemap with only indexable 200 URLs and monitoring of crawled but not indexed pages in Search Console.
2. Architecture and internal linking
Commercial pages within three clicks of the home page, orphan pages with demand found with a crawler, controlled facets and parameters and descriptive internal anchors.
3. Speed and Core Web Vitals
LCP, INP and CLS measured per template with field data, main content visible without relying on JavaScript, modern image formats and server response under 600 ms.
4. Duplicate content and metadata
Unique titles and meta descriptions, canonicals consistent with internal links, thin content detected at scale and reciprocal hreflang on multi-country sites.
5. Structured data and AI visibility
Organization and page-type schema, access allowed for the AI bots you care about, business information in plain text and direct answers at the top of key pages.
Free tools to run the audit
Every point can be checked with free tools: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test, the schema.org validator and the free version of Screaming Frog up to 500 URLs.
On large sites, review by template: a product page, a category, an article and a landing page. When a template fails, it fails across thousands of URLs at once.
How to prioritize what you find
Start with critical points, since they block crawling or indexing. Continue with important ones, which limit pages already indexed, and leave the nice-to-haves for the product backlog.
For each finding, write down the affected URL or template, the estimated impact and the owner. That table is what you take to the engineering meeting.