Technical SEO Audit Checklist: 25 Checks That Actually Move Rankings

A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can find, crawl, render and index your website efficiently — and whether real users get a fast, stable experience. It’s the foundation every other SEO effort sits on. Here are the 25 checks we run on every client site, grouped by priority.

Priority 1: crawling and indexing

1. Robots.txt isn’t blocking important pages, CSS or JavaScript.
2. XML sitemap exists, is submitted in Search Console and only lists indexable, 200-status URLs.
3. Index coverage: review Search Console’s Pages report for “Crawled – currently not indexed” and “Excluded” surprises.
4. Noindex tags are only on pages that should be hidden (cart, checkout, thank-you pages).
5. Canonical tags point to the preferred version of each page.
6. One version of the site: HTTP, HTTPS, www and non-www all 301 to a single canonical origin.
7. Status codes: no important pages returning 404 or 5xx errors.

Priority 2: speed and Core Web Vitals

8. Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on mobile.
9. Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds.
10. Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 — set width and height on images and embeds.
11. Images compressed, in modern formats (WebP/AVIF) and lazy-loaded below the fold.
12. Render-blocking CSS and JavaScript minimised; unused plugins removed.
13. Caching and a CDN enabled; server response time (TTFB) under 600ms.

Google’s Web Vitals documentation explains each metric in detail.

Priority 3: site structure and internal links

14. Every important page is reachable within three clicks of the homepage.
15. No orphan pages — every page has at least one internal link pointing to it.
16. Redirect chains and loops are flattened to a single 301.
17. Broken internal links are fixed at the source, not just redirected.
18. Clean, descriptive URLs without parameters for content pages.
19. Breadcrumbs on deeper pages for users and search engines.

Priority 4: on-page technical elements

20. Unique title tags and meta descriptions on every indexable page.
21. One H1 per page with a logical H2–H3 hierarchy.
22. Duplicate and thin content consolidated or improved.
23. Image alt text that describes the image.

Priority 5: enhancements

24. Structured data (Organization, Product, Article, FAQ, Breadcrumb) validates in Google’s Rich Results Test.
25. Mobile usability: readable text, tappable buttons, no horizontal scrolling.

How to prioritise what you find

Audits often surface hundreds of issues. Fix in this order: anything stopping important pages being indexed, then speed problems on your highest-traffic templates, then structural and internal linking issues, and finally enhancements like schema. One template fix can resolve thousands of URLs at once — always look for the root cause.

Final thoughts

Technical SEO isn’t glamorous, but it multiplies the return on everything else you do. A fast, crawlable, well-structured site lets your content and backlinks do their job. If your site is built on WordPress or Shopify, our website development team can fix issues at the theme level so they stay fixed.