Summary: A practical technical SEO audit checklist — crawling, indexation, speed, structured data, canonicals and more — with what to fix first.
Great content can't rank if search engines struggle to crawl, render or index it. Use these 25 checks to find the technical issues holding your site back.
Crawling and indexation
- robots.txt isn't blocking important sections or resources (CSS/JS).
- XML sitemap exists, is referenced in robots.txt and only lists indexable, 200-status URLs.
- Search Console shows no major spikes in "Crawled – currently not indexed" for key pages.
- No accidental noindex tags on important pages.
- Canonical tags point to the correct, preferred URL.
- One version of the site resolves (https, www or non-www) with 301 redirects from the others.
- No redirect chains longer than one hop.
- Broken links (4xx) are fixed or redirected.
- Orphan pages — important pages with no internal links — are linked from relevant pages.
Site architecture
- Important pages are reachable within three clicks from the homepage.
- URLs are clean, lowercase and descriptive — no unnecessary parameters or file extensions.
- Breadcrumbs help users and search engines understand hierarchy.
- Faceted navigation on ecommerce sites is controlled to avoid near-infinite URL combinations.
Performance
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is under 2.5 seconds for most users.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is under 200 ms.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is below 0.1.
- Images use modern formats (WebP/AVIF), correct sizes and lazy loading.
- Render-blocking CSS/JS is minimized and caching/CDN is configured.
Content signals
- Every page has a unique title tag and meta description.
- Each page has one clear H1.
- Duplicate or thin pages are consolidated or improved.
- hreflang is correct on multilingual sites.
Structured data and rendering
- Schema markup validates in the Rich Results Test.
- JavaScript-rendered content is visible in the rendered HTML Google sees.
- Mobile and desktop versions show the same core content.
What to fix first
Prioritize issues that block indexing (robots, noindex, canonicals), then site-wide performance problems, then page-level content issues. Fixing a single template issue can improve thousands of pages at once.
FAQs
How often should I run a technical audit?
A full audit once or twice a year, plus monthly monitoring of Search Console and Core Web Vitals.
Do Core Web Vitals really affect rankings?
They are part of Google's page experience signals. They rarely outweigh relevance, but they help in competitive results and improve conversions.
Can technical SEO help AI search visibility?
Yes. Pages that can't be crawled or rendered can't be cited by AI Overviews or AI assistants.
