What “technical SEO” actually means
Technical SEO is everything that affects whether search engines can find, crawl, render, understand and index your pages — and whether those pages load and behave well for the people who visit them. It is not about content quality or links, although it supports both. A brilliant page that Google can’t index will never rank.
A technical audit checks these foundations systematically. The output should not be a 200-page export of every warning a crawler found. It should be a prioritised list of problems, why they matter for your site and what to do about them.
What a technical SEO audit covers
1. Crawlability
Can search engines reach your important pages?
- robots.txt: is anything important blocked by mistake? Staging rules copied to a live site are a classic problem.
- Internal links: are key pages linked from other pages, or are some orphaned and only reachable through the sitemap?
- Crawl depth: how many clicks does it take to reach important pages from the homepage?
- Redirects: chains and loops waste crawling and slow down users.
- Broken links and error pages: internal links pointing to 404s, and server errors that appear under load.
2. Indexing
Of the pages Google can crawl, which ones does it actually index — and are they the right ones?
- Search Console indexing report: pages excluded as “crawled – currently not indexed” or “duplicate without user-selected canonical” often point to real problems.
- Noindex tags: are any valuable pages accidentally set to noindex?
- Canonical tags: do they point to the right version, and do they agree with internal links and the sitemap?
- Duplicate and near-duplicate content: URL parameters, tracking codes, printer versions, HTTP/HTTPS or www/non-www variants.
- Thin or low-value pages: large numbers of near-empty tag pages, filter combinations or auto-generated pages can dilute the site.
3. Site architecture and URLs
- A logical hierarchy that groups related pages, for example services, locations and resources.
- Clean, readable URLs that don’t change without redirects.
- Navigation and breadcrumbs that reflect the structure.
- A clear relationship between service pages and location pages on multi-location sites.
4. XML sitemaps
- Only indexable, canonical pages with a 200 status included.
- Sitemaps submitted in Search Console and free of errors.
- Separate sitemaps for large sections where that helps monitoring.
5. Page speed and Core Web Vitals
- Largest Contentful Paint: how quickly the main content appears.
- Interaction to Next Paint: how responsive the page is to taps and clicks.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: whether elements jump around as the page loads.
The audit should look at field data (real users) where it exists, not only lab scores, and identify the specific causes: oversized images, render-blocking scripts, heavy third-party tags, slow server response.
6. Mobile experience
Google primarily uses the mobile version of a site for indexing. The audit checks that mobile pages contain the same important content, links and structured data as desktop, and that tap targets, fonts and layouts work on small screens.
7. Rendering and JavaScript
On sites that rely on JavaScript to display content, the audit checks whether key content and links are present in the rendered page Google sees, and whether rendering depends on resources that are blocked or slow.
8. Structured data
- Correct schema types for the business and content: Organization or LocalBusiness, Service, Product, Article, FAQ where appropriate.
- Valid markup without errors in Google’s testing tools.
- Markup that matches the visible content on the page.
9. International and multilingual setup
For sites in more than one language or country: hreflang annotations, language-specific URLs, and canonicals that don’t point across languages.
10. Security and basics
HTTPS everywhere, no mixed content, a sensible 404 page and no leftover staging or test pages in the index.
How to prioritise the fixes
Most audits find more issues than a team can fix at once. The skill is in ordering them. We score each issue on three questions:
- Impact: how much does this affect pages that generate revenue or enquiries?
- Scope: does it affect a handful of URLs or thousands?
- Effort: is it a settings change, a template fix or a development project?
That usually produces four groups.
Fix immediately
Issues that stop important pages from being found or indexed. Examples: a robots.txt rule blocking a key section, noindex on service pages, canonical tags pointing to the wrong URL, a sitemap full of redirected pages after a migration. These can quietly remove pages from search, and they are often quick to fix.
Fix next
Issues that weaken important pages without removing them. Examples: slow mobile load times on your main landing pages, redirect chains from old URLs with backlinks, duplicate versions of key pages competing with each other, important pages buried several clicks deep.
Schedule
Improvements that help but aren’t urgent. Examples: structured data enhancements, cleaning up thin tag pages, tidying URL structures for new sections, improving internal linking between related content.
Ignore or monitor
Warnings that don’t matter for your site. Crawlers flag many things by default — meta descriptions slightly over a character count, missing alt text on decorative images, minor HTML validation notices. Some are worth a quick bulk fix; many can be left alone. An audit that treats every warning as equally urgent wastes development time.
What a useful audit report looks like
A good report should give you:
- a short executive summary of the few issues that matter most
- each issue explained in plain language: what it is, where it occurs, why it matters, how to fix it
- example URLs so developers can reproduce the problem
- a priority and rough effort estimate for each item
- a way to verify each fix after it’s deployed
If you receive an audit that’s mostly screenshots of tool dashboards, it hasn’t done its job. Our free SEO audit follows this format, and also looks beyond technical issues at local visibility, content gaps and lead tracking.
After the audit
The audit is only the start. Fixes need to be implemented, checked and monitored — ideally with Search Console and a scheduled crawl so regressions are caught quickly. Sites change constantly: new pages, plugins, tracking scripts and template updates all introduce new risks.
Large sites need extra attention. Online shops, for example, generate thousands of URLs through filters and variants, and crawl management becomes a core part of the work; our e-commerce SEO page covers this in more detail.
If you want an experienced team to run the audit and help implement the fixes, see our technical SEO service. If technical issues are only part of the picture, our SEO services overview explains how technical work fits with content and local visibility.