Who this technical SEO audit is for
- Sites with traffic or ranking stalls that free tools cannot explain
- Teams about to rebuild, redesign, or change CMS who need a baseline first
- Engineering and SEO pairs who want ticket-ready findings, not a slide deck
- Large sites with suspected crawl waste, soft 404s, or index bloat
Who this is not for
- Anyone looking for ongoing monthly SEO retainers instead of a diagnosis
- Brand-new domains with almost no crawlable content to review yet
- Teams that only want keyword research or content briefs
What a technical SEO audit checks
We organize every review around three systems: crawl, index, and Core Web Vitals. Crawl covers robots rules, XML sitemaps, internal link depth, redirect chains, and whether important templates are reachable. Index covers canonicals, pagination, parameter handling, duplicate clusters, and Search Console states such as crawled but currently not indexed. Core Web Vitals covers LCP, INP, and CLS on template types that matter commercially, not vanity homepage scores alone. For the full checklist mindset, see technical SEO audit checks that matter and what a real SEO audit checks that free tools miss.
Crawl: can Google reach the right URLs?
We crawl with a configured bot that respects your staging rules when needed, then compare crawl discoveries against sitemap declarations and Search Console coverage. We flag blocked money pages, orphan URLs with traffic or backlinks, infinite calendar or filter paths, and redirect hops that burn crawl budget. Robots mistakes are common and expensive when a staging disallow ships to production.
Example robots.txt issue we often catch before launch
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
# Staging rule left live after cutover.
# Money templates return 200 but stay blocked from Googlebot.Index: what should rank, and what should not?
Index control is where many sites bleed. Thin parameter URLs, near-duplicate category variants, and weak tag archives compete with the pages you actually want ranked. We cluster duplicates, verify canonical intent against what Google chooses, and separate true technical blockers from quality or demand problems. If Search Console shows large crawled currently not indexed buckets, we diagnose patterns instead of treating each URL as unique. That method is covered in crawled currently not indexed diagnosis.
Core Web Vitals: template performance that affects users
We sample key templates (home, category, product or article, conversion pages) on mobile field and lab data where available. We do not chase a perfect Lighthouse score. We identify the dominant delay: oversized hero media, render-blocking scripts, late fonts, layout shifts from injected banners, or third-party tags. Findings include the owning template and a realistic fix owner (front-end, CMS, tag manager).
How the audit process works
- Scope and access: property list, Search Console, analytics, staging if relevant, and known recent releases
- Crawl and log or coverage triangulation: map reachable URLs against what Google actually fetches and indexes
- Template and sample reviews: canonical, hreflang, structured data, pagination, and CWV on priority templates
- Scoring and write-up: every finding gets impact, effort, evidence, and a recommended owner
- Walkthrough: we present the roadmap so product and engineering leave with the same priority list
Scoring follows an impact-versus-effort model so a sexy Lighthouse tweak does not outrank a blocked category template. Read how we rank work in how to prioritise SEO audit findings.
| Site size | URL / template scale | Typical turnaround |
|---|---|---|
| Small | Under ~2,000 indexable URLs, few templates | 5–8 business days |
| Medium | ~2,000–50,000 URLs or multi-template CMS | 8–12 business days |
| Large | 50,000+ URLs, heavy params, or multi-locale | 12–20 business days |
What you receive
- Written technical SEO audit report with executive summary and method notes
- Prioritized finding list with impact, effort, evidence links, and owner hints
- Crawl and indexation appendix (coverage themes, duplicate clusters, blocked paths)
- Core Web Vitals notes by template, not a single vanity score
- Optional ticket export format your eng tracker can import
- Live walkthrough for SEO, product, and engineering stakeholders
Example finding ID format used in the report
TECH-IDX-014
Severity: High
Theme: Index bloat / parameter duplicates
Evidence: Crawl cluster + GSC "Alternate page with proper canonical"
Fix: Consolidate params; canonicalize to clean category URL
Owner: Platform / SEO
Effort: M | Impact: HOptional implementation after the audit
The audit stands alone. Many teams take the backlog in-house. If you want help, we can support implementation in a separate engagement: rewrite robots and sitemap rules, validate redirect batches, review PRs for SEO regressions, or re-crawl after releases. That work is scoped after diagnosis, never bundled as a vague retainer. If you are comparing a one-time diagnosis with continuous SEO work, SEO audit or ongoing SEO spells out the difference. You can also start from our SEO audit services agency overview if you need the full product list.
Honest limits of a technical SEO audit
A technical SEO audit will not write content, earn links, or guarantee ranking lifts. It tells you what is broken or wasteful in crawl, index, and performance systems. If demand or authority is the constraint, we say so. Diagnosis without that honesty wastes engineering time.