Technical SEO Audit: A Practical Checklist

Great content cannot rank if search engines cannot find, read or trust your pages. A technical audit checks the foundations. Here is a checklist you can work through.

Crawling and indexing

• Check that your robots.txt is not blocking important pages.
• Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console and check for errors.
• Review the Pages report for “Crawled, currently not indexed” and other issues.
• Make sure important pages are not accidentally set to noindex.

URLs and duplicates

• Use one preferred version of your domain (https, with or without www) and redirect the rest.
• Add canonical tags to prevent duplicate content problems.
• Fix broken links and long redirect chains.

Page experience

• Test Core Web Vitals and mobile usability.
• Serve everything over HTTPS without mixed-content warnings.

On-page basics

• Every page needs a unique title and meta description.
• Use one clear H1 and a logical heading structure.
• Add descriptive alt text to important images.

Structured data

Add relevant markup, such as Organization, Article or Product, and validate it in Google’s Rich Results Test.

Fix the issues that affect the most pages first, then re-check monthly.