How to Do a Technical SEO Audit (Step-by-Step)

A technical SEO audit systematically checks whether search engines can crawl, render, and index your site properly, and whether it meets modern performance standards. Here’s a practical process to follow:

Step 1: Crawl the site. Use a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to crawl your entire domain the way a search engine would. This surfaces broken links, redirect chains, duplicate title tags, and missing meta descriptions in one pass.

Step 2: Check indexation. Compare your sitemap’s URL count against Search Console’s indexed page count. A large gap usually points to either sitemap bloat (low-value URLs included) or an indexing problem worth investigating.

Step 3: Review Core Web Vitals. Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for real-user field data, prioritizing whichever metric is currently failing rather than optimizing metrics that already pass.

Step 4: Audit mobile usability. Use the Mobile Usability report in Search Console, and manually test key pages on an actual phone.

Step 5: Validate structured data. Run key page templates through Google’s Rich Results Test to catch schema errors.

Step 6: Check for duplicate content. Look for duplicate title tags and near-identical content flagged in your crawl data, and confirm canonical tags are set correctly.

Step 7: Review internal linking. Identify orphan pages and check that your most important pages are within a few clicks of the homepage.

Step 8: Prioritize fixes by impact. Not every issue needs fixing today — rank findings by estimated traffic or ranking impact, and tackle the highest-impact items first.