A technical SEO audit diagnoses the infrastructure problems that stop search engines — and now AI crawlers — from crawling, rendering, and indexing your site. If you have strong content that simply won’t rank, the cause is usually technical. This is the checklist we work through.
1. Crawlability and indexation
- Check robots.txt isn’t blocking important paths, and that no critical pages carry a stray
noindex. - Review the XML sitemap — it should list canonical, indexable URLs only, and be submitted in Search Console.
- Audit canonical tags for conflicts, and fix duplicate or parameter URLs.
- Confirm AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) aren’t accidentally blocked if you want AI visibility.
2. Core Web Vitals and speed
Google measures real-world LCP, INP, and CLS. Slow, janky pages lose rankings and conversions. Check field data in Search Console, then fix the common culprits: unoptimized images, render-blocking scripts, slow server response, and layout shift from late-loading elements. (We go deeper on this in why your WordPress site is slow and losing conversions.)
3. Site architecture and internal linking
Search engines understand importance through structure. Keep a shallow, logical hierarchy, link related pages together, and make sure every important page is reachable within a few clicks of the homepage.
4. Indexable, rendered content
If your site relies heavily on client-side JavaScript, confirm the content actually renders for crawlers. Server-rendered HTML is safest for both Google and AI systems that don’t execute JS.
5. Structured data
Validate your schema — Organization, Article, Product, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList — so engines understand your entities and can surface rich results and AI citations.
6. Indexing hygiene and errors
- Fix 404s and broken internal links.
- Resolve redirect chains and loops.
- Check HTTPS and mixed-content issues.
- Review Search Console coverage for “crawled – not indexed” patterns.
When to hire a technical SEO audit service
Run a DIY audit when your site is small and the fixes are obvious. Bring in a technical SEO audit service when: traffic dropped without an obvious cause; you’re planning a migration or replatform; your site is large or JavaScript-heavy; or rankings stagnate despite good content. A professional audit prioritizes issues by impact and hands you a roadmap, not a 400-line spreadsheet you’ll never action.
That’s exactly how our discovery & website audit works — a prioritized, plain-English plan — and our SEO & growth team can implement the fixes. If a migration is on the horizon, read our 301 redirect playbook first.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I run a technical SEO audit?
A full audit once or twice a year is typical, with lightweight monthly monitoring of Core Web Vitals, indexation, and crawl errors. Always audit before and after a migration, redesign, or major platform change.
How much does a technical SEO audit service cost?
Pricing ranges widely — from a few hundred dollars for a small-site diagnostic to several thousand for a large, complex, or enterprise site. The value is in the prioritized roadmap and the implementation that follows, not the report itself.
What’s the difference between a technical SEO audit and a content audit?
A technical audit examines how engines crawl, render, and index your site — the infrastructure. A content audit evaluates the quality, relevance, and performance of the content itself. Most sites need both, but technical issues are usually what block otherwise-good content from ranking.