A Technical SEO Audit Checklist for Growing Websites

A technical audit answers one question: can search engines find, render and understand the pages you care about? Work from access to quality, because a fix further down the list is wasted if the page cannot be crawled.

1. Crawling

Check robots.txt for rules that block important sections, then confirm that your XML sitemap lists only live, canonical URLs. Remember that robots.txt controls crawling rather than indexing.

2. Indexing

Use the page indexing report in Google Search Console to see which pages are excluded and why. Look for accidental noindex tags and for canonical tags that point somewhere unexpected.

3. Redirects and status codes

Internal links should point straight at the final URL. Replace redirect chains with a single hop, and fix links to pages that return 404.

4. Rendering

If key content or links appear only after JavaScript runs, compare the raw HTML with the rendered page. Content that reaches the page late is at greater risk of being missed.

5. Page experience

Review Core Web Vitals field data by template, not page by page. One fix to a shared template often helps thousands of URLs.

6. Structured data

Validate your markup and make sure it describes what is visible on the page. Valid markup makes a page eligible for rich results, but it does not guarantee them.

Prioritise before you fix

Rank each issue by the pages affected, their commercial value and the effort required. You can start with our free On-Page SEO Checker.