Technical SEO Audit

Crawlability and Indexation

Before Google can rank your pages, it has to find them, crawl them, and add them to its index. When any step in that process breaks down, your pages simply don't appear in search results — no matter how good the content is. Crawlability and indexation problems are among the most serious technical SEO issues because they affect visibility at the most fundamental level.

Robots.txt and Noindex Tags

The robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages they're allowed to access. A misconfigured robots.txt — something as simple as a stray Disallow: / directive — can block an entire website from being crawled. We've audited sites where entire service sections or product categories were inadvertently blocked from Google's crawlers for months, silently erasing rankings that had taken years to build.

Noindex meta tags instruct Google not to include a page in its index. These are legitimate tools when used intentionally — for thank-you pages, admin areas, or duplicate content. But when noindex tags are applied to pages that should rank, or when a staging environment's noindex configuration accidentally carries over to the live site at launch, the result is complete invisibility for the affected pages.

XML Sitemaps and Crawl Errors

An XML sitemap is a structured list of your site's URLs that helps Google discover and prioritize pages for crawling. A well-maintained sitemap includes only canonical, indexable URLs — not 404 pages, redirects, or noindexed content. Many sites have outdated sitemaps that include deleted pages, redirect chains, or URLs that no longer exist, which wastes crawl budget and creates confusing signals for Google's systems.

Crawl errors — the 404s, 500s, and soft 404s that Google encounters when attempting to access your pages — are logged in Google Search Console. We analyze these errors in full, distinguishing between legitimate 404s (pages that should be gone) and unintentional 404s (pages that exist but are linked to with incorrect URLs). Fixing broken internal links and setting up appropriate redirects is often one of the quickest wins in a technical audit.

Site Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google has made page experience — including site speed and Core Web Vitals — an explicit ranking factor. Slow pages frustrate users, increase bounce rates, and signal lower quality to Google's systems. Technical SEO audits evaluate site speed at both the page level and the server level, identifying the specific bottlenecks responsible for poor performance.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP measures how long it takes for the largest visible element on a page — typically a hero image or headline — to load and render in the viewport. Google considers LCP scores under 2.5 seconds "good," 2.5–4.0 seconds "needs improvement," and above 4.0 seconds "poor." Common LCP issues include unoptimized hero images, slow server response times, render-blocking JavaScript, and missing preload directives for critical resources. We identify the root cause of LCP failures and provide specific technical fixes — not just the score.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

INP replaced First Input Delay (FID) as the responsiveness metric in the Core Web Vitals set. It measures the delay between a user's interaction (click, tap, key press) and the browser's visual response. Poor INP scores are typically caused by heavy JavaScript execution that blocks the main thread. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability — how much page elements move around unexpectedly while loading. Ads that load late, images without defined dimensions, and dynamically injected content are common CLS culprits. Both metrics directly affect how Google evaluates page experience signals.

Mobile-Friendliness

Google's indexing is mobile-first, which means it primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking and indexation decisions. A site that looks and performs well on desktop but delivers a poor mobile experience is being evaluated on its worst version. Mobile SEO issues are frequently the cause of ranking drops that businesses incorrectly attribute to algorithm updates or content quality problems.

Our mobile audit checks responsive design implementation (do all elements reflow properly at mobile screen widths?), tap target sizing (are buttons and links large enough to tap without precision tapping?), font size legibility (does text remain readable without zooming?), and mobile page speed (mobile connections are slower — mobile-specific speed issues often differ from desktop ones). We test across multiple device emulations and flag specific implementation failures rather than generic mobile compatibility scores.

Canonical Tags and Duplicate Content

Duplicate content — multiple URLs that serve identical or very similar content — confuses Google about which version of a page to rank. It splits ranking signals across multiple URLs instead of concentrating them on a single canonical version, which dilutes the authority of all variations and can suppress rankings across the board.

Canonical Tag Implementation

The canonical tag (<link rel="canonical">) tells Google which URL you consider the authoritative version of a page. Every page should have a self-referencing canonical tag. When multiple URLs serve the same content (paginated pages, filtered product listings, URL parameter variations), the canonical should point to the primary version. We audit canonical implementations for correctness — checking that canonicals point to the right URLs, that they're consistent between HTML and HTTP headers, and that no canonicalization loops exist.

Common Duplicate Content Scenarios

The most frequent duplicate content sources we find include: www vs. non-www versions (both serving content without a redirect to a single preferred version), HTTP vs. HTTPS versions (the old HTTP version still accessible after an SSL migration), trailing slash variations (/services/ and /services both returning 200 status), session ID parameters in URLs (creating thousands of unique URLs with identical content), and printer-friendly pages or other content format variations that aren't properly canonicalized.

Structured Data Audit

Structured data is code — typically JSON-LD format — added to pages to help Google understand content in a machine-readable way. It enables rich results (star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, event listings) and feeds Google's AI systems. A structured data audit evaluates which pages have schema markup, which are missing it, and whether existing implementations are valid and correctly implemented.

We validate all structured data against Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org specification, identifying errors that would prevent rich result eligibility and warnings that indicate implementation gaps. Common structured data failures include referencing images that don't exist, using deprecated schema types, implementing schema that doesn't match the visible page content (which violates Google's guidelines), and missing required properties for specific schema types.

Crawl Budget Optimization

Crawl budget refers to the number of pages Google is willing to crawl and index from your site within a given timeframe. For smaller sites (under 1,000 pages), crawl budget is rarely a concern. For larger sites — e-commerce platforms, news sites, or websites that have grown organically over many years — crawl budget management becomes critical. Google's crawlers have finite capacity, and if your site wastes their time on low-value pages, high-value pages get crawled less frequently or not at all.

Internal Link Depth and Orphan Pages

Pages that require many clicks to reach from the homepage (link depth greater than three or four) are crawled less frequently by Google's crawlers. Orphan pages — pages with no internal links pointing to them — may not be crawled at all. We map your site's complete link graph to identify pages that are buried too deep in the architecture and pages that are completely disconnected from the rest of the site.

Redirect Chains and Loops

Every redirect wastes a portion of crawl budget and reduces the link equity that flows through to the final destination. A redirect chain — URL A redirects to URL B which redirects to URL C — is significantly worse than a single direct redirect. Redirect loops, where pages redirect to each other in a circle, cause crawlers to give up entirely. We map all redirect paths on your site and flag chains longer than one hop for consolidation.

What You Receive: Audit Deliverables

Our technical SEO audit delivers a comprehensive, prioritized report that gives you and your development team everything needed to implement fixes. The deliverable is structured around impact and urgency — not alphabetical lists of issues that leave you guessing what to fix first.

The audit report includes: a complete crawl export of all indexable pages with their technical properties, a prioritized issue list with severity ratings (Critical / High / Medium / Low), specific fix recommendations for each issue including exact code changes where relevant, baseline metrics (Core Web Vitals scores, crawl error counts, index coverage) to measure improvement against, and a quick-win section that identifies the ten highest-impact fixes that can typically be implemented within a week.

How Long a Technical Audit Takes

A thorough technical SEO audit takes between two and three weeks for most websites. Rushed audits miss important issues. The timeline breaks down as: crawl and data collection (two to three days), analysis and issue identification (four to five days), competitive technical benchmarking (two to three days), report writing and prioritization (three to four days), and a review call with your team to walk through findings and answer questions. For very large sites (100,000+ pages), we may scope additional time for crawl analysis.

Common Technical Issues We Find

After auditing dozens of business websites, the same technical problems appear repeatedly. The most common and impactful include:

• Missing or duplicate H1 tags: Multiple pages sharing an H1, or pages with no H1 at all — often caused by CMS template issues that apply the site name rather than the page-specific headline.
• Slow server response times: TTFB (Time to First Byte) above 600ms, indicating server-level performance problems that affect every page on the site regardless of other optimization efforts.
• Broken internal links: Links pointing to 404 pages that waste crawl budget and create dead ends in the user experience.
• Mixed content warnings: Pages served over HTTPS that still load resources (images, scripts, stylesheets) over HTTP — causing browser security warnings and potential indexation issues.
• 302 redirects instead of 301s: Temporary redirects (302) used in places where permanent redirects (301) are appropriate, resulting in partial link equity transfer instead of full pass-through.
• Pages indexed that shouldn't be: Thank-you pages, admin pages, search results pages, or parameter-generated URLs that are unnecessarily indexed and diluting overall site quality signals.