A technical SEO audit establishes whether a site can be crawled, indexed and served quickly enough to compete. It is diagnosis rather than treatment: the output is a prioritised list of what is wrong and what it costs you, not the fixes themselves.
What an audit covers
- Crawlability and indexation — whether pages can be reached and are being stored.
- Site architecture — how pages relate, how deep they sit, and what is orphaned.
- Duplication and canonicalisation — whether one piece of content exists at several addresses.
- Performance — load behaviour and Core Web Vitals.
- Rendering — whether content depends on JavaScript execution to exist.
- Redirects and status codes — chains, loops and pages returning the wrong thing.
- Structured data — accuracy and conflicts.
What separates a useful audit from a list
Any tool produces a list of issues. What a tool cannot do is decide which of them matters for your site, and that judgement is the entire value of the exercise.
A useful audit is ordered by impact, states what each issue costs in traffic or revenue terms, and is specific enough to hand to a developer. A list of several hundred warnings sorted by severity score is a report, not a plan. See why SEO audits fail.
Guides in this section
- Search Console for technical audits — using the data you already have.
Related reading
- What is a technical SEO audit — the scope explained in full.
- Technical SEO audit checklist — what to work through.
- Do I need a technical SEO audit — deciding whether it is the right next step.
- SEO roadmap after an audit — turning findings into sequenced work.
- Technical SEO audit cost — what it should cost.
When to run one
Before a migration or redesign, when traffic has dropped without an obvious cause, when pages are not being indexed, or before committing to an ongoing programme — since content investment on a site with structural problems compounds slowly, if at all.
To discuss an audit for your site, book an SEO consultation.
More in this section
- Free vs professional audits — what a tool report cannot tell you.
- How often to audit — driven by events and site size, not the calendar.