Technical SEO Audit Checklist: What to Check First

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1. Check That Google Can Actually Crawl Your Site
2. Confirm Every Important Page Is Indexed
3. Audit Your Core Web Vitals Score on Real Devices
4. Review Your URL Structure and Canonicals
5. Check Structured Data Is Present and Error-Free
6. Verify Your Hosting and Server Response Is Clean
7. Map Your Internal Links Before You Build New Content

Check That Google Can Actually Crawl Your Site

A robots.txt file with a single misplaced wildcard can block Googlebot from your entire site. It happens more than it should, often after a migration or a plugin update that overwrites the file silently. Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read every line. Look for Disallow: / applied to Googlebot without a matching allow rule beneath it.

Noindex tags are the other silent killer. A WordPress staging flag left on after launch, a theme option toggled in error, a page-builder setting nobody noticed. Check your important URLs individually using Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool, not just the coverage overview. The overview misses single-page issues until they accumulate.

Confirm Every Important Page Is Indexed

Open Google Search Console and pull the Coverage report. Filter for Excluded pages and work through each reason. ‘Crawled, currently not indexed’ is worth investigating because Google has seen the page and decided not to rank it, which usually means thin content, near-duplicate copy, or a canonical pointing somewhere unexpected.

For a quick cross-check, run site:yourdomain.com in Google and compare the rough count to your actual page total. A large gap between the two tells you something is wrong. Orphaned pages, pages with no internal links pointing to them, almost never surface in this check, so pair it with a crawl tool like Screaming Frog to catch what the site operator returns without follow links.

Audit Your Core Web Vitals Score on Real Devices

PageSpeed Insights gives you two scores, lab data and field data. Lab data is a simulation. Field data is what real users on real connections actually experienced, and it is the field data Chrome shares with Google as a ranking input. The two scores can differ significantly, especially on mobile.

Check your LCP, INP, and CLS scores in the field data section. If you have enough traffic, the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console shows page-group breakdowns rather than just individual URLs, which is far more useful at scale. A single slow template can drag down hundreds of pages at once. For a deeper look at what moves each metric, Core Web Vitals Explained: LCP, INP and CLS for Rankings covers the mechanics behind each signal.

Review Your URL Structure and Canonicals

Trailing slashes, HTTP variants, www versus non-www, and pagination parameters all create duplicate versions of the same page. Each version competes with the others. Google picks a canonical and consolidates authority there, but if your canonical tags point the wrong way, you may be consolidating authority to the wrong URL.

Audit every important page for a self-referencing canonical tag. Check that your preferred domain version (www or non-www, HTTPS) is the one the canonical points to. Then check that HTTP redirects to HTTPS cleanly, without a redirect chain. Chains add latency and lose a small amount of link equity at each hop. For a full pre-build checklist, Technical SEO Audit: 12 Things to Fix Before You Build Links goes deeper on canonicalisation errors worth fixing first.

Check Structured Data Is Present and Error-Free

Rich results, review stars, FAQ dropdowns, product pricing in search, all of these require valid structured data. One syntax error in the JSON-LD block, a missing required property, an incorrect type, and Google ignores the entire markup. The rich result disappears without any warning in standard Search Console unless you check the Enhancements tab.

Use Google’s Rich Results Test on your key page types. Check for errors, not just warnings. Warnings rarely block rich results. Errors always do. If you are adding new schema types, Structured Data for SEO: The Markup Types Worth Adding First is a useful reference for which types return the most visible gains.

Verify Your Hosting and Server Response Is Clean

Time to First Byte above 600ms is a crawl efficiency problem before it is a user experience problem. Googlebot assigns a crawl rate partly based on how fast your server responds. A slow server means fewer pages crawled per day, which matters most for larger sites. Check TTFB using WebPageTest with a UK server location if your audience is UK-based.

Redirect chains are worth a dedicated pass. A page that has moved twice, once from HTTP to HTTPS, once from an old slug to a new one, may carry a 301 pointing to a 301. Resolve chains to a single direct redirect. Web Hosting Choices That Quietly Kill Your SEO covers how server configuration decisions compound into ranking problems over time.

Map Your Internal Links Before You Build New Content

An orphaned page receives no PageRank regardless of how many external links point to the domain. Internal links are how authority moves between pages. Before publishing new content, crawl your site and identify pages with fewer than two or three internal links pointing to them. Those pages are effectively invisible to Google’s ranking algorithm.

Check link depth too. Pages more than three clicks from your homepage take longer to crawl and are crawled less frequently. If your most important commercial pages are buried four or five levels deep, shallow the architecture before you invest in new content sitting above them in the hierarchy.