A technical SEO audit finds everything stopping Google from crawling, indexing and ranking your pages, and turns it into a prioritised plan your team or mine can work straight from. Every finding is checked against the live site before it’s reported, so you fix real problems, not tool noise.
Most sites do not have a hundred technical problems. They have three that matter and ninety-seven that a tool flagged.
What a technical SEO audit is
A technical SEO audit is a full review of the parts of your website that search engines depend on: whether pages can be crawled and indexed, how URLs, redirects and canonicals are set up, how fast and stable pages are on mobile, whether structured data is valid, and whether AI crawlers can reach your content. It ends with a list of issues ranked by how much they matter.
It’s different from a content review or a keyword plan. Those decide what your pages should say. A technical audit makes sure Google can find those pages, understand them and trust the site they sit on.
Who it’s for
A technical SEO audit is most useful for businesses whose site matters to sales or enquiries and where something isn’t adding up. It’s a good fit if:
- traffic has dropped and there’s no obvious reason
- pages you’ve published aren’t showing up in Google
- you’re planning a redesign or new platform and want a baseline first
- your site has grown over years with different developers and plugins
- you’ve never had anyone look properly under the bonnet
Small brochure sites with a handful of pages usually don’t need the full audit. The free assessment will tell you whether yours does.
Warning signs your site needs one
Some problems show up clearly in Google Search Console if you know where to look:
| What you might see | What it can mean |
|---|---|
| Pages marked “Crawled, currently not indexed” | Google found the page but didn’t think it was worth indexing |
| Clicks falling while rankings look stable | Titles, snippets or AI Overviews taking the click |
| Duplicate URLs with and without trailing slashes or parameters | Signals split across copies of the same page |
| Rising 404 errors after site changes | Broken links or missing redirects |
| Poor Core Web Vitals on mobile | Slow or unstable pages losing visitors |
What the audit covers
The audit runs as several specialist checks side by side, then I review and combine the results:
| Area | What’s checked |
|---|---|
| Crawlability | Robots.txt, crawl depth, internal linking, orphan pages, JavaScript rendering |
| Indexing | Index coverage in Search Console, noindex tags, canonicals, duplicate and thin pages |
| URLs and redirects | Redirect chains and loops, broken links, parameter handling, URL structure |
| Page speed | Core Web Vitals on mobile and desktop, heavy images and scripts |
| On-page basics | Titles, meta descriptions, headings, missing and duplicate tags, read from the raw HTML |
| Structured data | Schema present, valid and matching what’s visible on the page |
| Sitemaps | XML sitemaps listing only live, indexable, canonical URLs |
| International | Hreflang set-up, where the site serves more than one country or language |
| AI readiness | Whether AI crawlers such as GPTBot and Google’s crawlers can reach your content |
| Security | HTTPS, mixed content and security headers |
The automated crawl covers up to 500 pages in a single run. Larger sites are audited in sections, or through a full Screaming Frog crawl, so nothing gets skipped.
What I need from you
The audit can start from nothing more than your website address, but a few things make it far more useful:
- Read-only Google Search Console access, so the audit shows how Google actually sees your pages, not just what a crawler finds
- Google Analytics 4 access, to see which pages bring in visits and enquiries
- A list of your most important pages, such as best-selling categories or key services, so priorities match what makes you money
- Anything that’s changed recently, like a redesign, new plugins, a platform move or a traffic drop and roughly when it happened
- Who makes changes to the site, so the briefs are written for the right person
If you don’t have Search Console set up, that’s often the first finding, and I’ll help you set it up so the data starts collecting.
How every finding is checked
Crawling tools report problems that aren’t really there more often than you’d think, so nothing goes in the report without being verified first. Error pages are re-requested, because crawlers get rate-limited and see errors real visitors don’t. A duplicate URL is checked for a canonical or noindex before it’s flagged. A redirect is never mistaken for a canonical. Titles and descriptions are read from the raw HTML, because some tools strip that part of the page.
That checking takes time, and it’s the difference between an audit you can act on and a list of 400 warnings nobody reads.
What you get
- A plain-English overview of the biggest issues and what they’re costing you
- A prioritised action plan, ranked by impact and effort, so the important fixes happen first
- Developer-ready briefs, one issue per brief, with the affected URLs and the exact fix
- Supporting data: the crawl, affected URL lists and Search Console evidence
- A walkthrough call, if it’s easier to talk it through
Sample output
Each issue in the action plan follows the same format, so it’s clear what’s wrong, why it matters and what to do:
ISSUE: 38 product URLs redirect twice before reaching the final page (a redirect chain). WHY IT MATTERS: Each extra hop slows crawling and can dilute the signals passed to the final URL. ACTION: Update the redirects so each old URL points straight to its final destination, and update internal links to use the final URLs. AFFECTED URLS: see redirect-chains.csv
The example above is illustrative. For a real audit, the Shake Shack UK case study shows how 11 high-priority issues, including an offers page accidentally set to noindex, were prioritised, fixed and checked on the live site.
After the audit
The audit is where the work starts, not where it ends. Most clients go one of three ways: their own developer works from the briefs, I make the changes directly where access is agreed, or the audit becomes the first stage of an ongoing SEO strategy and 12-month plan.
Either way, I recheck the site once the fixes are in, so you know they’ve worked.
Results and limitations
Technical audits and content strategies I’ve delivered include Tribera Living, a European student accommodation and coliving provider, and Shake Shack UK, where the work included image SEO fixes. The results of an audit depend on the fixes being made, so the case studies set out what was implemented and what changed.
What an audit won’t solve
A technical audit won’t make weak content rank, and it won’t build the authority a site gets from being cited and linked to. If your pages don’t answer what people are searching for, the audit will say so, but fixing it is content work, not technical work. It also can’t promise a ranking or traffic figure, because nobody honestly can.
Talk to the person doing the work
There is no account manager here and no team to be handed to. If you get in touch, it is me who reads it, me who looks at your site, and me who does the work if we go ahead.
Get in touch, or start with a free assessment.
Engagement and price
The technical SEO audit is priced as a one-off project, based on the size and complexity of the site. Quoted after a free analysis. There are no list prices.
How the audit gets done
The crawl and specialist checks run through the site audit system and technical SEO checks, with Search Console data analysed by the Search Console audit tool. It sits within my wider SEO services, and pairs naturally with a Search Console audit when traffic has dropped.
If you’d like to understand what’s involved before booking one, what an SEO audit covers, and what it should cost goes through it in more depth, and how to use Google Search Console for a small business shows the checks you can run yourself.
FAQ
How long does a technical SEO audit take?
It depends on the size and complexity of the site. A small business site with a few hundred pages is usually much quicker than a large ecommerce store with filters and thousands of products. Most of the time goes into verifying findings and writing clear briefs, not running the crawl.
Do you need access to my website to do the audit?
No. The crawl works from the public site. Read-only access to Google Search Console makes the audit much more useful, because it shows how Google actually sees your pages, which ones are indexed and where clicks are being lost. Website access is only needed if you want me to make the fixes.
What’s the difference between a technical SEO audit and a free assessment?
The free assessment is a short first look at your biggest issues and opportunities. A technical SEO audit crawls the entire site, checks every template and issue in depth, verifies each finding against the live pages, and ends with a prioritised action plan and developer-ready briefs your team can work from.
Will a technical SEO audit improve my rankings?
The audit itself doesn’t change anything. The fixes it recommends remove the problems stopping Google crawling, indexing and trusting your pages, which often leads to better visibility once they’re made. How much depends on how serious the issues are and on your content and competitors, so I don’t promise ranking figures.
Get your audit booked
Get in touch with your website address and what’s prompting the audit, or message me on WhatsApp. If you’re not sure you need the full audit, start with a free assessment.