Technical SEO Audit Checklist: A Practical Guide

A technical SEO audit is the health check your website needs before you spend on content or campaigns. If Google cannot crawl, index and understand your pages properly, even great writing stays invisible. This technical SEO audit checklist walks through the checks we run for clients across India and overseas, using tools most teams can access for free.

You do not need an expensive stack to start. Google Search Console, Screaming Frog and PageSpeed Insights cover most of the ground. What matters is working through each area in order and fixing issues by impact, not by whichever one you noticed first.

Indexing and coverage in Search Console

Start where Google already tells you what it thinks of your site. Open the Pages report under Indexing in Google Search Console and read the reasons pages are not indexed. Common ones are "Crawled & currently not indexed", "Discovered & currently not indexed", "Excluded by noindex tag" and soft 404s.

Check that your important pages actually show as indexed. Use the URL Inspection tool on a few key URLs to confirm their status and request indexing if needed. Watch for the gap between how many pages you have and how many Google keeps. A large gap usually points to thin pages, duplication or crawl budget being spent on URLs that should not exist.

Crawlability, robots.txt and sitemaps

Next, confirm search engines can reach what you want them to reach. Open your robots.txt file and check nothing important is blocked by a stray Disallow rule. It happens more often than people expect, especially after a site migration or staging launch.

Then review your XML sitemap. It should list your live, canonical, indexable URLs and nothing else, no redirects or 404s. Submit it in Search Console and check the sitemap report for errors. Running a full crawl in Screaming Frog shows you how a bot actually moves through your site, which pages are orphaned and where crawl paths break.

Site speed and Core Web Vitals

Speed affects both rankings and how many visitors stay. Run your key page types through PageSpeed Insights and read the field data first, since that reflects real users. Focus on the three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.

The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console groups URLs by status, so you can see whether a problem is site-wide or limited to one template. Typical fixes include compressing images, serving them in modern formats, deferring unused JavaScript and reserving space for images and ads so the layout does not jump while loading.

Mobile-friendliness and HTTPS

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so treat mobile as the default view, not an afterthought. Check that text is readable without zooming, tap targets are spaced out and nothing important is hidden on smaller screens. PageSpeed Insights reports mobile performance separately, which is a good place to catch layout and speed issues together.

On security, confirm the whole site runs on HTTPS with a valid certificate. Every HTTP version should redirect to its HTTPS equivalent, and pages should not load any insecure resources. Mixed content warnings quietly undermine trust and can break how a page renders.

Canonicals, duplicate content and redirects

Duplicate content confuses search engines about which page to rank. Use canonical tags to point each set of similar or parameter-based URLs to the single version you want indexed. In Screaming Frog you can list every canonical on the site and spot pages that point at the wrong URL or have none at all.

Audit your redirects too. Broken links returning 404s waste crawl budget and frustrate visitors, so fix or redirect them. Replace long redirect chains with a single hop, and make sure permanent moves use 301s rather than temporary 302s. Search Console and a Screaming Frog crawl together will surface most of these.

Structured data and internal linking

Structured data helps Google understand your content and can make your listings eligible for rich results. Add relevant schema such as Organisation, Article, FAQ or LocalBusiness, then validate it with the Rich Results Test and watch the Enhancements reports in Search Console for errors.

Finally, look at internal linking. Every important page should be reachable within a few clicks from the homepage, and pages on related topics should link to each other with descriptive anchor text. A crawl reveals orphan pages that have no internal links pointing to them. If you would rather have this handled for you, our SEO & Google growth service covers audits and fixes end to end.

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