Run a complete technical SEO audit yourself with this step-by-step guide. Covers crawlability, indexing, Core Web Vitals, schema, mobile, and more — with a free downloadable checklist.

A technical SEO audit is a systematic review of your website’s technical health — identifying every issue that prevents search engines from crawling, indexing, and ranking your content effectively. Done properly, a technical audit finds the problems you did not know you had and prioritises them by the impact they have on your rankings.

This guide gives you a complete, step-by-step audit process that our team at 3wBiz uses with clients — adapted for self-service use. Work through each section in order and use the checklist at the end to track your progress.

What Is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO audit evaluates your website’s infrastructure — not your content or backlinks — focusing on:

Crawlability: Can search engine bots access your pages?
Indexability: Is Google indexing the right pages and excluding the wrong ones?
Site architecture: Is your URL structure logical and your internal linking effective?
Page speed and Core Web Vitals: Is your site fast enough to rank?
Mobile usability: Does your site work correctly on mobile devices?
Structured data: Is your schema markup valid and complete?
HTTPS and security: Is your site served securely without mixed content?
Duplicate content and canonicalisation: Are duplicate pages properly handled?

Technical issues in any of these areas can suppress rankings across your entire site — even for pages with strong content and backlinks.

Tools You Need

You do not need paid tools to run a basic technical audit, though they help with scale:

Free tools:

Google Search Console (essential — use this throughout)
Google PageSpeed Insights
Chrome browser DevTools (F12)
Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs)

Paid tools (optional but recommended for larger sites):

Ahrefs Site Audit (see our free Ahrefs site audit guide)
Semrush Site Audit
Screaming Frog unlimited licence

For a review of which tools suit which use cases, see our best technical SEO audit tools guide.

Step 1: Crawl Your Website

Before reviewing GSC data, run a crawl of your site using Screaming Frog or a similar crawler. This replicates what Googlebot sees when it visits your site.

How to crawl with Screaming Frog:

Download and install Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Enter your homepage URL and click Start
Let the crawl complete (for small sites, under 5 minutes; for large sites, longer)
Export the full URL list

What to look for in the crawl results:

Response codes:

All 200s = pages loading correctly
301s = redirects (check redirect chains — more than 1 hop is inefficient)
302s = temporary redirects (should these be 301s?)
404s = broken pages — export this list
5xx errors = server problems

Meta robots:

Pages with noindex — are these intentional?
Pages with nofollow on the meta robots — is this correct?

Canonical tags:

Any pages with no canonical tag
Any pages with a self-referencing canonical (correct)
Any pages with a canonical pointing to a different URL — is that the correct canonical?

Title tags and meta descriptions:

Missing title tags (pages with no <title>)
Duplicate title tags (multiple pages sharing the same title)
Title tags over 60 characters (will be truncated in search results)
Missing meta descriptions
Duplicate meta descriptions

Step 2: Crawlability Audit

Check robots.txt

Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt directly. Verify:

No Disallow: / for all bots — this blocks your entire site
Your Sitemap URL is listed: Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Pages that should be blocked are blocked (/wp-admin/, /checkout/, /cart/, internal search result pages)
Pages that should be crawled are NOT blocked (your main content pages, product pages, category pages)

See our full robots.txt guide for GSC for more detail.

Check Sitemap

Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml (or sitemap_index.xml). Verify:

The sitemap loads without errors
It contains your most important pages
It does NOT contain noindex pages, 404 pages, or blocked pages
Submit the sitemap URL in GSC → Sitemaps if not already done
In GSC, check the indexed/submitted ratio — should be above 70% for a healthy site

Check for Crawl Depth Issues

Pages buried more than 3–4 clicks from your homepage may not be crawled regularly. In Screaming Frog, the “Crawl Depth” column shows how many clicks from the homepage each URL is. Any important pages at depth 5+ should be brought closer via internal linking.

Step 3: Indexability Audit

GSC Pages (Coverage) Report

Go to GSC → Indexing → Pages. Review each category:

“Indexed” count: Should include all your important content pages. If the count seems too low relative to how many pages you have published, check for mass noindex or crawl blocks.

“Not indexed” — priority categories to address:

Work through this priority list:

Crawled — Currently Not Indexed — Your most urgent content quality issue. See our full guide on fixing this.
Not found (404) — Broken pages losing ranking equity
Server error (5xx) — Server reliability issues
Blocked by robots.txt — Check whether blocking is intentional
Excluded by noindex — Verify each noindexed page is intentionally excluded

Check for Noindex on Important Pages

In Screaming Frog, filter for pages with noindex in meta robots. Go through every result. Common accidental noindex scenarios:

The entire site noindexed from a development phase that was never reversed
A WordPress SEO plugin has noindexed a post type (e.g. all WooCommerce products)
Category pages, tag pages, or author pages noindexed that should be indexed
A caching plugin serving a stale noindex version

Step 4: Duplicate Content and Canonicalisation Audit

Duplicate content is one of the most common technical SEO issues — especially on ecommerce sites, WordPress sites with multiple URL variants, and any site that has grown organically over time.

Identify Duplicate Page Groups

In Screaming Frog → Content tab → check for pages with near-identical content. Look for:

Product pages accessible via multiple URL paths
Category pages with sort/filter parameters creating additional URLs (?sort=price, ?colour=red)
Pagination pages (/page/2/, /page/3/) that may be competing with page 1
www and non-www versions both accessible (should redirect one to the other)
HTTP and HTTPS versions both accessible (should redirect HTTP to HTTPS)

Check Canonical Implementation

For every URL that has a duplicate, verify:

The canonical URL exists and is the correct preferred version
The canonical tag on the duplicate points to the canonical URL
The canonical URL itself has a self-referencing canonical tag
Internal links throughout the site point to the canonical URL, not the duplicate

See our guides on Duplicate Without User-Selected Canonical for a complete walkthrough.

Step 5: Site Architecture and Internal Linking Audit

URL Structure

Good URL structure is:

Short and descriptive: /google-search-console-errors/not-found-404/ is good
Consistently formatted: all lowercase, hyphens not underscores, no special characters
Hierarchical where appropriate: reflects the site’s topic structure
Permanent: changing URLs without redirects causes traffic loss

Review your URL patterns for inconsistencies — mixed formats, overly long URLs with dates and IDs, or flat structures where hierarchy would help.

Internal Linking

In GSC → Links → Internal Links, identify:

Orphaned pages — pages with zero or very few internal links. These receive no authority from the rest of your site and are unlikely to rank.
Over-linked pages — if your homepage or navigation links to a page from every page on your site, the link loses significance.

Priority fix: Find your most important pages (product pages, service pages, best articles). Count their internal links. Anything with fewer than 3–5 internal links from relevant content is underserved. Add contextual links from your other articles.

Step 6: Core Web Vitals Audit

Go to GSC → Experience → Core Web Vitals. Check the mobile report (prioritise mobile).

Identify all pages in “Poor” status for each metric:

Poor LCP (over 4 seconds): Likely caused by large images, slow server, or render-blocking resources
Poor CLS (over 0.25): Likely caused by images without dimensions, dynamic content injection, or font loading
Poor INP (over 500ms): Likely caused by heavy JavaScript execution or large DOM

For detailed fix guides, see our articles on LCP, CLS and INP, and Core Web Vitals overview.

Quick CWV check for any page:

Go to PageSpeed Insights
Enter your URL
Run test on mobile
Note LCP, CLS, and INP values
Review “Opportunities” section for specific fixes

Step 7: Mobile Usability Audit

Go to GSC → Experience → Mobile Usability. Address every error listed — these directly impact how Google evaluates your site under mobile-first indexing.

Common errors and fix priority:

Viewport not set (critical — fix immediately)
Text too small to read (high priority)
Content wider than screen (high priority)
Clickable elements too close together (medium priority)

See our complete mobile usability errors guide for fix instructions for each type.

Step 8: Structured Data Audit

Go to GSC → Enhancements. For each structured data type listed, check for errors and warnings.

Additionally, test your most important pages in Google’s Rich Results Test:

Enter your page URL
Run the test
Note which rich result types are detected
Fix any validation errors shown

Priority schema for most sites:

Article (with author and datePublished)
FAQPage (for all FAQ sections)
Organisation (for homepage and about page)
BreadcrumbList (for all content pages)
Product (for ecommerce product pages)

Step 9: HTTPS and Security Audit

Check HTTPS:

Visit your site — does the browser show a padlock/security indicator?
Check that http://yourdomain.com redirects to https://yourdomain.com
Check that https://www.yourdomain.com and https://yourdomain.com both work and one redirects to the other (to avoid duplicate content)

Check for mixed content: If your site is on HTTPS but loads any resources (images, scripts, stylesheets) over HTTP, you have mixed content. Browser DevTools → Console shows mixed content warnings.

Fix mixed content:

Update all resource URLs from http:// to https:// in your content and templates
For WordPress: the Better Search Replace plugin can find and update all HTTP references in the database

Check GSC Security Issues: GSC → Security & Manual Actions → Security Issues. Should show “No issues detected.”

Step 10: Redirect Audit

Check for redirect chains: A redirect chain is when URL A redirects to URL B which redirects to URL C. Each additional hop wastes crawl budget and loses a small amount of link equity. Screaming Frog → Redirects tab shows all redirect chains.

Fix redirect chains: Update the first redirect to point directly to the final destination, bypassing the intermediate URL.

Check for redirect loops: URL A → URL B → URL A (infinite loop). These cause the page to fail to load and show as redirect errors in GSC.

Check that old, important URLs have redirects: Use GSC’s “Not found (404)” list to identify previously-indexed URLs now returning 404s. Add 301 redirects for any that had ranking history.

The Complete Technical SEO Audit Checklist

Crawlability

Robots.txt reviewed — no unintentional blocks
Sitemap submitted in GSC and returning no errors
Important pages within 3 clicks of homepage
Crawl errors in Screaming Frog reviewed and actioned

Indexability

GSC Pages report reviewed — all error types actioned by priority
No important pages with accidental noindex
No important pages blocked by robots.txt
Sitemap indexed/submitted ratio above 70%

Duplicate Content

Canonical tags implemented on all duplicate/variant URLs
www/non-www redirect in place
HTTP to HTTPS redirect in place
Faceted navigation URLs handled (noindex or blocked)

Architecture and Internal Linking

URL structure consistent and descriptive
No orphaned important pages (0 internal links)
Service pages and conversion pages have 5+ internal links
Internal links use descriptive, keyword-relevant anchor text

Core Web Vitals

Mobile CWV report — no “Poor” pages
LCP under 2.5s on mobile
CLS under 0.1 on mobile
INP under 200ms on mobile

Mobile Usability

Viewport meta tag present on all pages
No mobile usability errors in GSC
Text readable without zooming on mobile

Structured Data

Rich Results Test passing on key pages
No structured data errors in GSC Enhancements
Article, FAQ, and Org schema implemented

Security

HTTPS active and working
No mixed content warnings
GSC Security Issues report clean

Redirects

No redirect chains over 1 hop
No redirect loops
All important deleted/moved pages have 301 redirects

After the Audit: Prioritisation

Not every issue needs to be fixed with equal urgency. Prioritise by this framework:

Fix immediately (ranking risk):

robots.txt blocks on important pages
Server errors (5xx)
Accidental noindex on key pages
Security issues

Fix this month (significant impact):

404 errors on previously-ranked pages
Crawled — currently not indexed (content quality)
Core Web Vitals — poor LCP on high-traffic pages
Canonical tag issues on high-value pages

Fix this quarter (incremental gains):

Schema markup improvements
Internal link additions to orphaned pages
Redirect chain cleanup
Mobile usability error resolution

Getting a Professional Technical SEO Audit

A self-service audit catches most common issues. But the most impactful technical problems — crawl budget issues on large sites, complex canonical conflicts, JavaScript rendering issues, and log file analysis — require specialist tools and experience to identify and fix correctly.

Our team at 3wBiz conducts professional technical SEO audits using enterprise tools and delivers a prioritised action plan. Most clients see measurable ranking improvements within 30–60 days of implementing our recommendations. Request a free audit quote

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