A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can discover, understand and index a website efficiently. It also identifies technical friction that affects visitors, such as broken paths or slow templates. The audit should produce a prioritised repair plan, not a spreadsheet of warnings without context.
Use this checklist for a first review, then consider a detailed professional SEO audit when the site is large, recently migrated or losing organic visibility.
Confirm indexation and canonical signals
Check which important pages appear in search and which unexpected pages have been indexed. Review robots directives, canonical tags and noindex rules. Each indexable page should have a clear preferred URL, and canonical tags should not point to redirects, errors or unrelated content.
Pay special attention to filtered pages, parameters, print views, staging copies and duplicate product URLs.
Review robots.txt and XML sitemaps
The robots file should not block resources needed to understand important pages. XML sitemaps should contain canonical, indexable URLs that return successful responses. Separate large or different content types where it improves monitoring, and keep modification dates accurate.
Crawl the site like a search engine
Look for broken internal links, redirect chains, orphan pages, duplicated titles and inconsistent status codes. A crawl reveals patterns that are difficult to find page by page. Compare crawl results with analytics, sitemap and search-platform data to identify valuable pages that are hard to reach.
Check site architecture and internal links
Important services and categories should be reachable through a logical path from the main navigation or relevant hub pages. Use descriptive anchor text and connect related content naturally. Avoid relying on forms, scripts or search boxes as the only way to reach an important URL.
A broader SEO strategy should align this structure with customer questions and commercial priorities.
Standardise URL behaviour
Choose consistent rules for secure URLs, hostnames, trailing slashes and letter case. Redirect alternate versions once to the preferred destination. After a migration, map old high-value URLs to their closest relevant equivalents rather than sending everything to the home page.
Test mobile usability and page experience
Review representative templates on real devices. Content should fit the viewport, controls should be usable and essential information should not depend on hover. Measure loading and visual stability using both lab tests and field data when available.
Optimise the largest images, reduce unnecessary scripts, reserve space for media and examine slow server responses. A modern web design implementation should balance visual presentation with accessibility and performance.
Inspect structured data
Structured data should accurately represent visible page content and use the most specific relevant type. Validate syntax, required properties and eligibility, but remember that valid markup does not guarantee a search feature. Remove unsupported or misleading fields.
Check international and language signals
If the site targets multiple languages or regions, each page should have a stable URL and reciprocal language annotations. Avoid automatic location redirects that prevent users or crawlers from accessing another version. If the site serves one market, keep signals consistent rather than adding unnecessary complexity.
Prioritise by impact and dependency
Fix issues that prevent indexing or affect many valuable pages before polishing isolated metadata. Group tasks by template and underlying cause. Assign owners, test in a safe environment and recrawl after release.
A technical audit is complete only when the highest-impact findings have been implemented and verified.