How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit
A practical technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can discover, crawl, understand, and index the important pages on your website. Start with the issues that block access or create misleading signals, then work toward improvements in performance and maintainability.
SEOmate editorial guide
Use this guide as a starting checklist, then validate recommendations against your own site, templates, and search performance.
1. Check crawling and indexability
Review your robots.txt file and make sure it does not block pages you want search engines to crawl. Inspect important URLs in Google Search Console, and check whether they return a successful status code rather than errors or redirect chains.
2. Review your XML sitemap
Include canonical, indexable URLs that you want search engines to discover. Remove redirects, error pages, duplicate URLs, and pages marked noindex. Submit the sitemap in Google Search Console and monitor processing issues.
3. Inspect canonical tags and duplicates
Look for duplicate or near-duplicate pages, inconsistent trailing slashes, parameter URLs, and conflicting canonical tags. Canonicals should point to the preferred version of a page and should agree with internal links and sitemap URLs where possible.
4. Check site structure and internal links
Important pages should be reachable through useful internal links. Avoid orphan pages, excessive click depth, broken links, and navigation patterns that make content difficult for users or crawlers to find.
5. Test mobile performance and usability
Use Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights to review mobile performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO audits. Treat scores as diagnostic signals; also test real templates and key journeys on mobile devices.
6. Prioritize fixes
Fix indexability problems and widespread template issues before low-impact cosmetic warnings. Record each issue, affected URLs, evidence, priority, owner, and retest date. Recheck the affected templates after deployment.
Put this into practice
Use the relevant SEOmate tool to support your workflow, then verify the result on your live website.
Open related SEO tool →This article is general educational guidance. Search engine systems change, and individual results depend on the site and query. Verify important changes with current documentation and your own data.