Technical SEO Audit: What It Finds and What to Fix First

A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can find, crawl, render and index the pages of your website, and whether anything in the way the site is built is holding those pages back. A useful audit ends with a short, ranked list of fixes tied to pages that matter to your business, not a 200-row export from a tool. For most small and medium business sites, the problems that matter are a handful: pages that are not indexed, duplicate addresses, broken redirects, slow templates and settings left over from development.

This article is for business owners, founders and marketing managers who have been offered an audit, or who suspect their site has a technical problem. It explains what an audit covers, what it usually finds, what to fix first, what it should cost and when you can handle it yourself.

#What technical SEO covers

Technical SEO is everything about how a site is built and served that affects whether search engines can reach and understand it. Content and links decide how well a page can rank; technical SEO decides whether the page is in the race at all.

Google's technical requirements (opens in a new tab) are short. Googlebot must not be blocked, the page must return an HTTP 200 success code, and the page must have indexable content. Google adds that meeting these does not mean a page will be indexed. Everything else in technical SEO is about removing friction and sending clear signals on top of that baseline.

In practice, an audit looks at six areas:

• Crawling: robots.txt rules, firewall or CDN settings that block bots, broken internal links, redirect chains, server errors.
• Indexing: noindex tags, canonical tags, duplicate addresses, soft 404 pages, the XML sitemap.
• Rendering: whether important text and links exist in the HTML or only appear after JavaScript runs.
• Site structure: how pages link to each other, how deep important pages sit, URL patterns.
• Page experience: Core Web Vitals, mobile layout, HTTPS.
• Structured data and international signals: schema markup, hreflang for sites in several languages.

#What a proper audit usually finds

Most business sites I look at do not have exotic problems. They have a few ordinary ones that have been sitting unnoticed for months. These are the findings that come up again and again.

#Pages that are quietly not indexed

Search Console's Page indexing report (opens in a new tab) lists every reason Google has for leaving a URL out: blocked by robots.txt, marked noindex, duplicate without a user-selected canonical, soft 404, server error, redirect error and others. Google says plainly that you should not expect every URL on a site to be indexed, so the audit question is not "why is anything excluded" but "is any page that brings in business excluded".

A service page marked noindex by a theme setting, or a product category Google treats as a duplicate, can cost enquiries for months without anyone noticing.

#Duplicate addresses for the same page

The same page often answers at several addresses: with and without www, over http and https, with tracking parameters, with and without a trailing slash. Google's guide to consolidating duplicate URLs (opens in a new tab) ranks the fixes by strength: a redirect is the strongest signal, a rel canonical tag is strong, and listing the URL in a sitemap is weak. The audit should check that all three point the same way, because conflicting signals are the usual cause of Google picking a different version from the one you wanted.

#Redirects that broke during a redesign

Old addresses that now return 404, or redirect through three hops, are the most common leftover from a redesign. They lose the value of old links and bookmarks. If your traffic fell after a new site launched, my article on why redesigns lose Google traffic covers the recovery side in detail.

#Content that only appears with JavaScript

Google renders JavaScript with a headless Chromium browser, but its JavaScript SEO basics (opens in a new tab) still call server-side rendering or pre-rendering a good idea, partly because not all bots can run JavaScript. An audit checks that headings, body text and internal links are present in the HTML the server sends, not only in what the browser builds afterwards.

#Slow templates and a weak mobile layout

Google completed mobile-first indexing (opens in a new tab) in October 2023, so the mobile version of your site is the one Google mainly crawls. Its page experience guidance (opens in a new tab) says Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, while also saying a perfect score is not required. The audit should name the slow templates and their cause. The detail of what LCP, INP and CLS measure is in my Core Web Vitals guide.

#Bots blocked by mistake

Security plugins, CDN bot protection and hosting firewalls sometimes block Googlebot, Bingbot or AI search crawlers without the owner knowing. Google's page on AI features and your website (opens in a new tab) lists allowing crawling "by any CDN or hosting infrastructure" as a basic, not just in robots.txt. If AI answers matter to you, the AI search optimisation guide explains which crawlers to allow.

#What to fix first

Fix problems in the order of how much business they block, not how many warnings a tool shows. A site can carry hundreds of minor warnings and still rank well; one wrong noindex on the main service page cannot.

Priorities 1 and 2 are usually a few hours of work once found, and they are where most of the value of an audit sits. Priority 3 can turn into a larger job if the site's theme or framework is the cause.

#Structured data and other polish

Structured data is worth checking in an audit, but it sits low in the order because it does not fix indexing or speed. Google's structured data guidelines (opens in a new tab) say markup must match what visitors can see, and that valid markup still does not guarantee a rich result. Several rich results have also been retired in the last few years, so an audit should not recommend markup for features Google no longer shows. My article on schema markup for business websites covers which types still matter.

The same goes for crawl budget. Google's crawl budget guide (opens in a new tab) is written for sites with roughly 1 million+ unique pages changing weekly, or 10,000+ pages changing daily, and Google calls these rough estimates. For a typical business site, a current sitemap and a regular look at the Page indexing report are enough. An audit that spends pages on crawl budget for a 60-page site is padding.

#What a good audit report looks like

A good audit report is short enough to act on. You should be able to read the summary in five minutes and know what is wrong, what it costs you and who will fix it.

Look for these in the report:

• A summary in plain words. The three to five problems that matter, with the pages they affect.
• Evidence for each finding. A Search Console screenshot, an example URL, the status code returned. Not just "issue detected".
• Business impact. Which pages bring in enquiries or sales, and which findings touch them.
• A ranked fix list. With an estimate of effort and whether it needs a developer, the content team or nobody.
• A way to verify. What should change in Search Console or analytics after the fix, and roughly when. Google's SEO Starter Guide (opens in a new tab) notes that some changes show within hours and others take several months.

Be wary of reports that are mostly raw tool output, scores without explanation, or recommendations that match every site on the internet. Google's own advice on hiring an SEO (opens in a new tab) is direct: no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and you should find someone else if they promise one.

#What a technical SEO audit costs

The cost of an audit depends on the size of the site, the platform and how much fixing is included. A 30-page WordPress brochure site and a 5,000-product store with filters and several languages are very different jobs, even if both are called an audit.

What drives the price:

• Number of templates, not pages. A 500-page site built from six templates is often quicker to audit than a 50-page site where every page was built by hand.
• Platform. WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify and custom JavaScript apps each fail in their own ways.
• Access. With Search Console, analytics and hosting access, the audit is faster and more accurate.
• Audit only or audit plus fixes. Finding a problem and fixing it are separate pieces of work. Ask which one you are paying for.
• History. A recent migration, a hack or a drop in traffic means more investigation.

I work hourly at USD 10 to 15 per hour, or give a fixed written quote after a short call once I have seen the site and the Search Console data. The pricing page has the details. Whoever you hire, ask for the scope in writing: which areas are checked, what the report contains and whether fixes are included.

#Do it yourself or hire help

A lot of a basic technical check is within reach of an owner. If you can log in to Search Console, you can open the Page indexing report, inspect your five most important URLs and see whether they are indexed. You can also check that your domain answers on one version only, with and without www.

Hire help when the cause is not obvious or the fix is in the code: pages excluded for reasons you cannot explain, a traffic drop after a redesign, a JavaScript framework, a store with thousands of filter URLs or a site in several languages. That is the work of technical SEO services, and speed problems found in an audit lead into website performance optimisation. If you are about to launch a new site rather than fix an old one, the website launch SEO checklist is the better starting point.

#Where to start

Open Google Search Console, go to the Page indexing report and look at the reasons pages are not indexed. Then use URL Inspection on your home page and your three most valuable service or product pages. If they are indexed, served over HTTPS and load reasonably fast on a phone, your site has no emergency. If any of them is missing, that is the first fix, and it is worth getting looked at before spending money on content or links.