What a technical SEO audit actually checks

“Technical SEO” covers everything that decides whether search engines can find, read and trust a site before anyone judges the content itself. An audit works through it in roughly the order a search engine does.

Can search engines reach the pages?

• robots.txt isn’t blocking sections that should be public, a surprisingly common leftover from a staging site.
• Status codes are right: live pages return 200, moved pages return a single 301, and removed pages return 404 or 410.
• Server errors (5xx) and timeouts are rare. Search engines crawl less when a server struggles.
• Crawl traps such as endless calendar pages or filter combinations aren’t eating the crawl.

Should each page be indexed?

• noindex tags are only where they’re intended.
• Canonical tags point to the right version of each page.
• Duplicates are consolidated: http and https, www and non-www, trailing slashes, and URL parameters should all resolve to one address.
• XML sitemaps list only pages that are live, canonical and indexable.

Can search engines understand it?

• Every page has a unique, descriptive title and a sensible heading structure.
• Structured data (organisation, articles, products, FAQs) is valid and matches what’s on the page.
• Internal links connect related pages, and no important page is left orphaned with nothing linking to it.

Is it fast and mobile-friendly?

Google indexes the mobile version of a site, so the mobile experience is the one that counts. Core Web Vitals field data shows how the site performs for real visitors, and it’s where speed optimization starts.

Did anything break along the way?

Redesigns and migrations leave debris: redirect chains, old URLs that now 404, internal links still pointing at redirects. Server logs and Search Console’s page indexing report show where search engines are hitting dead ends.

What you end up with

The output isn’t a score. It’s a list of specific problems, the pages affected, and the fix for each, ordered so the highest-impact work comes first. That’s what our technical SEO audits deliver.