How to Run a Technical SEO Audit (Step by Step)

A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can find, crawl, understand and index your pages—and whether anything on the site makes them less likely to rank. It is not a content review and it is not a link audit, although it often reveals problems in both.

The goal is not a perfect score in a tool. The goal is to remove the barriers between your most valuable pages and the people searching for them. A site with 300 minor warnings can perform well; a site with one misplaced noindex tag on its main service page cannot.

Open Google Search Console and review the Pages report. Compare the number of indexed pages with the number of pages you expect to rank. Large gaps in either direction are a signal: too few means important pages are excluded, too many usually means duplicates, parameters or thin pages are diluting the site.

Inspect your top ten commercial URLs individually with the URL Inspection tool. Confirm each one is indexed, that Google selected your preferred canonical, and that the rendered HTML contains the main content.

Run a full crawl with a tool such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Look for broken internal links, redirect chains, pages blocked by robots.txt, conflicting canonical tags and orphan pages that no other page links to.

Pay attention to click depth. Pages that sit five or more clicks from the homepage tend to be crawled less often and are treated as less important. Your key service and product pages should be reachable within two or three clicks.

Structure tells search engines which pages matter and how topics relate. Check that each core service or product has one clear page, that supporting articles link to it, and that you are not running several pages that compete for the same search intent.

Keyword cannibalisation is one of the most common issues we find on growing sites: three blog posts and a service page all targeting the same phrase, with none of them ranking well. Consolidating or clarifying their roles often produces faster gains than creating new content.

Check Core Web Vitals in Search Console and test key templates with PageSpeed Insights. Focus on templates rather than individual URLs: fixing the product template improves every product page at once.

Common culprits are oversized images, render-blocking scripts, heavy third-party tags and layout shifts from late-loading banners. Speed is rarely the reason a page fails to rank on its own, but it affects conversions directly.

Test structured data with Google's Rich Results Test and fix errors on templates that matter commercially—products, services, articles and organisation details. Then review titles and meta descriptions for duplicates, truncation and missing search intent.

Structured data also helps AI search tools interpret your pages, which makes it more valuable than it was a few years ago.

Score each issue on two dimensions: how much commercial value is affected, and how much effort the fix requires. Indexing problems on revenue pages come first. Cosmetic warnings on old blog posts come last—or never.

Assign an owner and a deadline to every item, and re-check the affected pages in Search Console after each fix. An audit that is not implemented is just an expensive document.