What a technical SEO audit covers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.