Guide

The Technical SEO Audit Checklist

Optimization & Maintenance30 June 202617 pages

What you'll learn in this guide.

Most technical audits fail in one of two ways: they produce 200 findings nobody actions, or they check the easy things and miss the architectural problem doing the damage. This is the sequence we run instead — seven passes from indexation to internationalisation, each producing a small number of findings that either matter or do not, plus the six problems we see most often, a prioritisation model and a one-page reporting template. Written for in-house SEOs, marketing managers and developers who need an audit that ends in shipped fixes.

How to reconcile what your CMS has, what a crawler finds and what Google has actually indexed
How to write a faceted navigation policy — the single biggest source of wasted crawl on large sites
Where to find orphaned pages that still carry external links, and why they are the cheapest win in any audit
How to check rendering, so you know whether Google sees your content or an empty shell
Which Core Web Vitals data to trust, and why Lighthouse cannot measure the metric most sites fail
The six findings that recur on almost every site, and what each one costs
How to prioritise so an audit produces ten actions rather than two hundred rows

Inside the guide

How to use this, and what you need
Pass 1 — Indexation: what does Google actually have?
Pass 2 — URL and parameter policy
Pass 3 — Architecture and internal linking
Pass 4 — On-page fundamentals
Pass 5 — Structured data
Pass 6 — Performance and rendering
Pass 7 — Hygiene, security and internationalisation
The six findings we see most often
Prioritising what you found
Appendix — The one-page audit report template

A seven-pass audit that finds what is actually holding a site back, in the order that makes each finding meaningful.

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