> What a technical SEO audit checks on a business website: crawling and indexing, redirects, speed, mobile use, structured data, and what you should get back. - Canonical: https://hadalmedusa.com/guides/what-a-technical-seo-audit-covers/ --- # What a technical SEO audit covers A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can find, read and trust every page of a site, and whether the site is fast and usable for the people who arrive. A good audit ends in a short, ordered list of fixes, not a spreadsheet of warnings. Updated 6 October 2026 ## Crawling and indexing Search engines can only rank pages they are allowed to fetch and choose to keep. An audit reads the robots.txt file and the sitemap, then checks every page for a stray “noindex” instruction, for the canonical address it declares, and for the status code it returns. Google Search Console’s Pages report shows the same thing from Google’s side: which pages are indexed, which are not, and the reason given for each. ## Redirects and broken links Every changed address needs one permanent redirect to its replacement. An audit follows each redirect to its end and reports chains of several hops, redirects that end on an error, and links inside the site that point at pages that no longer exist. The audit also confirms that the plain “http” and the “www” forms of the address each lead to the one main version. ## Speed and Core Web Vitals Google measures real visits with three figures, known as the Core Web Vitals: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to a tap or click, and how much the layout shifts while loading. An audit reports each figure for the main page types, on mobile first, and names what causes the slow ones, which is usually oversized images, heavy scripts or slow hosting. ## Mobile use and accessibility basics Most searches happen on phones, and Google indexes the mobile version of a page. An audit checks that text is readable without zooming, that buttons are large enough to tap, that nothing scrolls sideways, and that images carry text descriptions and headings follow in order. ## Titles, descriptions and structured data Page titles and descriptions are what a searcher reads on the results page. An audit lists pages that share a title, lack a description or carry one too long to display. Structured data, the labelled facts a page gives search engines about a business, a product or a set of questions, is checked for errors and for claims the visible page does not make. ## Internal links Links between a site’s own pages tell search engines which pages matter. An audit finds pages that nothing links to, important pages buried many clicks from the home page, and link text such as “click here” that says nothing about the page it leads to. ## What you should get back A useful audit report is short. Each finding states what is wrong, the evidence, the pages affected and what fixing it involves, and the findings come in the order to fix them. The report also says what was not checked, so a clean result is not mistaken for a complete one. ## Questions people ask ### How often does a site need a technical audit? Audit after any redesign, platform change or large content change, and otherwise about once a year. Sites that publish or change pages every week benefit from a monthly crawl, which catches problems while they are small. ### Can I run a technical SEO audit myself? The basics are within reach. Google Search Console shows indexing problems and PageSpeed Insights measures speed, and both are free. A crawler is needed to check every page for broken links, redirect chains and duplicate titles. ### Does a technical audit improve rankings by itself? An audit changes nothing until its findings are fixed. Fixing them removes what holds pages back. Whether rankings then rise depends on the content and on what competitors do. ## Free competitor gap report For a first read of your site against the sites you compete with, name up to three competitors. We crawl all of them, compare the technical findings side by side and send you the list in priority order. 1. Speed and technical health, side by side 2. On-page SEO and site structure 3. The content they are found for and you are not 4. Who holds the searches that matter in your market 5. A prioritised list of what to fix first [Request your free report by email](mailto:contact@hadalmedusa.com?subject=Competitor%20gap%20report%3A%20Guide%3A%20What%20a%20technical%20SEO%20audit%20covers&body=Website%3A%0D%0A%0D%0AWhere%20you%20compete%20(area%2C%20country%20or%20countries)%3A%0D%0A%0D%0ACompetitors%20to%20compare%20against%20(up%20to%20three)%3A%0D%0A%0D%0AAnything%20else%20we%20should%20know%3A%0D%0A%0D%0A) - **Address** — contact@hadalmedusa.com - **Include** — your site; up to three competitors; where you compete ## More guides - [Why a competitor outranks you, and how to check](https://hadalmedusa.com/guides/why-a-competitor-outranks-you/) - [A local SEO checklist for UK businesses](https://hadalmedusa.com/guides/local-seo-checklist-uk/) - [How to check if ChatGPT recommends your business](https://hadalmedusa.com/guides/does-chatgpt-recommend-your-business/) - [All guides](https://hadalmedusa.com/guides/) - [On-site SEO: what the service includes](https://hadalmedusa.com/services/seo/)