Quick answer: A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can crawl, render, index and understand your website. My checklist covers seven areas in order: crawling, indexing, redirects and broken links, site architecture, page experience, structured data and monitoring. I run it every month across 30+ client websites, and it keeps 11 of them at Ahrefs health scores of 90–100.
Here is the exact process, in the order I work through it, with the tools I use for each step.
1. Can search engines crawl the site?
Start by crawling the site the way a search engine would. I use Ahrefs Site Audit and Screaming Frog.
- Check
robots.txtfor rules that block important sections by mistake. - Look for pages that return errors (4xx and 5xx) or time out.
- Find crawl traps: endless filter, calendar or parameter URLs that waste crawl time.
- Confirm important pages are reachable through internal links, not only through the sitemap.
2. Are the right pages indexed?
Crawled is not the same as indexed. In Google Search Console, the Pages report shows which URLs are indexed and why others are not.
- Make sure every page that should rank is indexed.
- Check that thin, duplicate or private pages carry
noindexor a correct canonical tag. - Keep the XML sitemap clean: only canonical, indexable pages that return 200.
3. Are redirects and links clean?
Broken links and redirect chains build up quietly as sites grow. This step often has the biggest impact on large sites.
- Fix or redirect broken internal links and broken pages with backlinks.
- Collapse redirect chains into a single 301 to the final URL.
- Map redirects whenever pages are moved, merged or retired.
On one multi-location medical website with 18,700+ URLs, this step alone cut broken URLs by 82%, from about 620 to 109. Read the full case study.
4. Does the site structure make sense?
- Keep important pages within a few clicks of the home page.
- Group related pages so topics and services form clear clusters.
- Use descriptive internal link text that tells users and search engines what the target page is about.
- Find orphan pages (pages with no internal links) and either link them or retire them.
5. Is the page experience good?
Check Core Web Vitals in Search Console using real-user (field) data, then use PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse or GTmetrix to find the cause.
- Largest Contentful Paint: is the main image or heading loading fast?
- Interaction to Next Paint: do buttons and menus respond quickly?
- Cumulative Layout Shift: do images and ads have reserved space so the page doesn’t jump?
- Fix templates first. One template fix can improve thousands of pages at once.
6. Is structured data correct?
Schema markup helps search engines and AI systems understand what a page is about: an organization, a local business, a medical clinic, an article or an FAQ.
- Validate markup with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator.
- Make sure the markup matches what users can see on the page.
- Keep business details (name, address, phone) consistent with your Google Business Profile.
7. Is the site monitored every month?
An audit is a snapshot. Sites change every week, so I re-crawl monthly, track priority keywords and report what changed. Across my current portfolio that means tracking 200+ priority keywords and reporting in GA4, Search Console, Ahrefs and Looker Studio.
How often should you run a technical SEO audit?
Run a full audit when you start working on a site, after any redesign or migration, and then a lighter check every month. Monthly checks catch new problems while they are still small: a plugin update that blocks a folder, a batch of retired pages that now return 404s, or a template change that slows down every page. Large or fast-changing sites, such as multi-location healthcare sites, benefit most from monthly monitoring.
How do you prioritize audit findings?
An audit tool can list hundreds of issues. Not all of them matter. I sort every finding by two questions: how many important pages does it affect, and how hard is it to fix?
| Priority | What it looks like | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Fix now | Blocks crawling or indexing of key pages | A noindex tag left on service pages after a launch |
| Fix this month | Wastes crawl time or loses link value at scale | Hundreds of broken internal links or redirect chains |
| Plan | Improves experience across a template | Slow Largest Contentful Paint on all location pages |
| Monitor | Low impact or cosmetic | A few missing image alt texts on old blog posts |
What technical issues do I find most often?
- Broken internal links and old URLs that were never redirected after pages moved.
- Redirect chains, where one URL redirects to another that redirects again.
- Duplicate pages without a clear canonical, often from tracking parameters or filters.
- Sitemaps that list redirected, broken or
noindexpages. - Missing or invalid schema on location and service pages.
- Large, uncompressed images that slow down the main content.
None of these are glamorous, but fixing them is how I keep 3 client sites at a perfect 100/100 Ahrefs health score, including a Fort Worth criminal defense firm.
Which tools do you need for a technical SEO audit?
| Task | Tools I use |
|---|---|
| Crawling and site health | Ahrefs Site Audit, Screaming Frog |
| Indexing and search performance | Google Search Console |
| Page speed and Core Web Vitals | PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, GTmetrix, Chrome DevTools |
| Structured data | Rich Results Test, Schema Markup Generator |
| Reporting | GA4, Looker Studio |
If you would like this checklist run on your site, see my SEO services or contact me.