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Technical SEO Audit Checklist: 7 Steps to Fixing Website Issues

ByGrowth Machine

Is your website struggling to rank on Google despite having great content? The sneaky culprit might be your technical SEO.

While creating engaging content is crucial for SEO success, your website’s technical foundation is equally important in your search engine rankings.

In this value-packed guide, we’ll walk you through an in-depth technical SEO audit checklist to help you identify and fix any behind-the-scenes issues that might hold your website back.

What Is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO audit focuses specifically on your website’s infrastructure and how well search engines can crawl, index, and render your web pages.

Think of it as a routine inspection of your website’s engine room, where all the technical elements that power your search engine optimization come together.

Essential Tools for Your Technical SEO Audit

Before diving into your checklist, it helps to have some crucial SEO tools. We’ll get more into the functions that each of these performs in a moment, but here are some audit tools we’d recommend:

  • Google Analytics and Google Search Console for site performance tracking
  • Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI)
  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider Website Crawler
  • Google’s Schema Markup Testing Tool

Your 7-Step Technical SEO Audit Checklist

Time to take the first step in boosting your search engine visibility! Let’s dive into each crucial component of your technical SEO audit.

1. Assess Crawlability

For your site to snag a spot at the top of the SERPs, it’s critical that search engines can properly access and crawl your website:

  • Check your robots.txt file to ensure crawlers can navigate and understand your website’s content.
  • Verify that your XML sitemap is in place and up to date
  • Review your crawl stats in Google Search Console
  • Check for crawler directives (such as noindex and no follow tags)
  • Ensure proper handling of URL parameters

2. Revisit Your Site Architecture and URL Structure

A clean logical site structure helps both users and search engines navigate your site with ease. Here are some ways to clean up your site architecture:

  • Implement a clear URL hierarchy
  • Check that canonical tags have been setup correctly
  • Verify that HTTPS has been implemented for site security
  • Optimize your URL structure (avoiding dynamic URLs where possible)
  • Fix any broken internal links, backlinks, and redirects

3. Test Site Speed and Core Web Vitals

Thanks to Google’s Page Experience Update back in 2020, page experience has become a key ranking factor. Here’s how to check that your site speed (and overall user experience) are on point:

  • Analyze Core Web Vitals (examining metrics like CLS, INP, and LCP)
  • Optimize your image sizes and formats
  • Minimize the amount of CSS/JavaScript files on your site
  • Enable browser caching
  • Implement lazy loading for images to reduce page load time and size

4. Optimize for Mobile-Friendliness

Google now uses mobile-first indexing — that means your mobile experience must be flawless to deliver the best user experience. Here’s how you can optimize your site for mobile devices:

  • Test mobile responsiveness using an online testing tool
  • Check for mobile usability issues
  • Verify your Viewport for mobile users with Google Search Console
  • Ensure tap targets (such as buttons, links, and other interactive elements) are properly sized and usable
  • Test mobile page speed of your most important pages regularly

5. Implement Structured Data

Think of structured data as a roadmap to help search engines better understand your content. To develop your roadmap:

  • Implement relevant Schema markup
  • Validate your structured data using Google’s free tool
  • Check for errors in the Rich Results Test
  • Monitor your structured data performance in Google Search Console

6. Check Your JavaScript Plugins

Most modern websites rely heavily on JavaScript, which requires some special considerations when it comes to SEO:

  • Conduct client-side testing to guarantee ease of use, speed, and flexibility
  • Implement dynamic rendering when necessary
  • Check for JavaScript errors
  • Monitor JavaScript resources loading

7. Don’t Forget International SEO (If Applicable)

If your website targets a global audience or multiple languages, you’ll need to take a few extra technical SEO steps:

  • Check your hreflang implementation
  • Verify language targeting
  • Review your international targeting settings
  • Make sure you have a proper URL structure
  • Monitor geotargeting in Google Search Console

5 Common Technical SEO Issues to Watch For

You’ve got your technical SEO audit checklist. But how do you know what’s normal and when something is off?

Here are some frequent problems that might come up that require your attention.

Duplicate Content Issues

When multiple URLs display identical or very similar content, it confuses search engines about which version to rank. This commonly occurs with both www/non-www versions of a page or printer-friendly versions.

Learn more about how duplicate content might be blocking your SEO efforts (and how to fix it!).

Broken Internal and External Links

Dead links lead to 404 errors or non-existent pages, which wastes your crawl budget and creates a poor user experience, potentially harming your site’s authority.

Missing or Duplicate Meta Tags

When pages lack unique title tags and meta descriptions, or you have multiple pages with the same meta information, it makes it hard for search engines to understand the page’s purpose. This can hurt your click-through rates, so you want to avoid them at all costs.

Slow-Loading Resources

Large images, unoptimized pieces of code, or render-blocking JavaScript all increase page load times and damage your user experience. Remember: Google specifically considers page speed in its ranking algorithms, so make sure your resources are all properly sized and compressed for better usability.

Improper Redirect Chains

A chain of redirects can be frustrating for users. Additionally, it slows down your site speed and wastes your crawl budget, making it harder for your site to rank.

You’ve Completed Your Technical SEO Audit Checklist — Now What?

Congratulations! Once you’ve finished your site audit, here are some five ways you can put your findings into immediate action.

1. Prioritize Your Technical SEO Fixes Based on Impact and Effort

Create a matrix that ranks issues by their potential impact on SEO and what resources will be required to fix them.

First, focus on “quick wins” — high impact issues that require minimal effort, like fixing broken links or adding missing meta descriptions. Save the more complex problems for later phases (or leave it to an SEO professional).

2. Create an Implementation Plan

Break down each technical issue into specific, actionable tasks with clear deadlines, then assign those responsibilities to the appropriate team members.

Your plan should include backup procedures for major changes and testing protocols to make sure the fixes don’t create new problems.

Consider dependencies between tasks — for example, completing redirects before updating your internal links.

3. Monitor Changes Through Google Search Console

To track how search engines respond to your improvements, keep an eye on Google Search Console. Monitor key metrics like crawl stats, indexing coverage, and your Core Web Vitals reports and set up custom reports to track specific issues you’ve addressed to watch for changes in search performance.

4. Schedule Follow-Up Audits

You’ve completed your SEO audit, so you’re done, right? The digital marketing landscape is always growing and evolving, so it’s important to stay on top of your technical SEO to avoid any major drops in your rankings.

Set up quarterly mini-audits to catch new issues early and plan a comprehensive annual audit to keep your site technically healthy. Use automated monitoring tools to alert you of any critical issues.

5. Document Improvements and Results

Lastly, keep detailed records of all changes made and their impact on key metrics like rankings, organic traffic, and conversion rates.

These records will help justify future SEO investments and provide valuable insights for future optimizations.

Need Help With Your Technical SEO?

We get it: Technical SEO can feel overly complicated. Especially when you’re trying to run your business.

At Growth Machine, our team of SEO experts can figure out your technical issues while you focus on what you do best — growing your business.Ready to improve your website’s foundation? Contact us today for a comprehensive technical SEO audit that will set your site up for success.

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