How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit Step-by-Step
A full checklist for improving crawl health and index coverage.
A technical SEO audit is essential for ensuring your website is fully optimized for search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking. Whether you’re launching a new site or maintaining an existing one, this step-by-step guide will help you identify and fix issues that could be holding back your organic performance.
Step 1: Crawl Your Website
Use tools like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Ahrefs Site Audit to simulate how search engines crawl your site.
✅ Checklist:
- Identify broken links (404 errors)
- Detect redirect chains and loops
- Find orphan pages (no internal links)
- Review crawl depth and click distance
- Check for duplicate content and titles
Step 2: Check Index Coverage
Use Google Search Console to review which pages are indexed and which are excluded.
✅ Checklist:
- Review “Coverage” report for errors and warnings
- Identify pages marked “Crawled – currently not indexed”
- Ensure important pages are not blocked by
robots.txtornoindextags - Submit sitemaps and monitor indexing status
Step 3: Analyze Site Architecture
A well-structured site improves crawl efficiency and user experience.
✅ Checklist:
- Use a logical hierarchy with clear parent-child relationships
- Ensure internal linking supports topical clusters
- Implement breadcrumb navigation
- Avoid deep nesting (keep important pages within 3 clicks of the homepage)
Step 4: Optimize URL Structure
URLs should be clean, descriptive, and SEO-friendly.
✅ Checklist:
- Use hyphens to separate words
- Avoid dynamic parameters when possible
- Keep URLs short and keyword-rich
- Ensure canonical URLs are correctly set
Step 5: Review Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
Use PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse to assess performance.
✅ Checklist:
- Optimize Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- Improve Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
- Minimize Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- Compress images and enable lazy loading
- Use efficient caching and CDN delivery
Step 6: Mobile Optimization
With mobile-first indexing, your mobile site is your primary SEO footprint.
✅ Checklist:
- Ensure responsive design across all devices
- Use legible fonts and touch-friendly elements
- Avoid intrusive interstitials
- Test with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Step 7: Validate Structured Data
Structured data helps search engines understand your content and display rich results.
✅ Checklist:
- Use Schema.org markup for services, reviews, FAQs, etc.
- Validate with Google’s Rich Results Test
- Ensure markup matches visible content
- Avoid errors and warnings in Search Console’s “Enhancements” report
Step 8: Audit Security and Accessibility
✅ Checklist:
- Ensure HTTPS is enabled and enforced
- Fix mixed content issues
- Use accessible HTML tags and ARIA labels
- Provide alt text for images
- Ensure keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility
Step 9: Monitor Logs and Crawl Budget
For large sites, server logs can reveal how Googlebot interacts with your site.
✅ Checklist:
- Identify crawl frequency and priority pages
- Detect crawl waste (bots hitting irrelevant pages)
- Optimize crawl budget by pruning low-value URLs
Step 10: Document and Prioritize Fixes
✅ Checklist:
- Create a spreadsheet of issues, severity, and recommended actions
- Assign tasks to developers, designers, or content teams
- Re-audit after implementation to confirm improvements