Technical SEO is the layer most business owners never see, and it is usually the reason rankings stall with no obvious cause. Get it wrong and Google struggles to reach and read your pages, which quietly caps everything else you do. This is the checklist we run before every launch and every few months after, written so you can work through it on your own site.
What technical SEO really covers
Technical SEO is everything that helps search engines reach your pages and understand them. It sits underneath your content and your links. You can publish the best guide on your subject and still land on page four because one setting blocks Google from indexing it.
Most issues fall into a handful of groups: whether Google can reach a page, whether it can read the page once it gets there, how fast the page loads, how your pages link together, and how clearly each page describes itself. A technical seo audit is really just working through those groups in a sensible order. Nothing here needs a computer science degree. It needs patience and a habit of checking rather than assuming.
Start with crawling and indexing
If Google cannot crawl and index a page, none of the clever work matters. So this is always first.
Check what is actually indexed
Open Google Search Console and look at the Pages report under Indexing. Compare the indexed count against how many pages you think should be live. If you run 400 products but only 120 show as indexed, that gap is your first job. Click into the reasons Google gives, such as “Crawled currently not indexed” or “Discovered currently not indexed”, and note which URLs are affected.
Audit robots.txt and meta robots
Your robots.txt file sits at yoursite.com/robots.txt. Read it line by line. We have lost count of the sites that shipped with “Disallow: /” left over from staging, which tells every crawler to stay out of the whole domain. Then check for stray noindex tags in the page head. A single noindex on a template can wipe a category of pages off search overnight.
Also confirm your XML sitemap is clean. It should list only canonical, indexable URLs that return a 200 status. Do not dump redirected or 404 URLs into it. Submit it in Search Console and watch how many Google actually reads.
On a small site of a few hundred pages, crawl budget is not something to worry about, since Google will reach everything. On a large site with tens of thousands of URLs, it matters. If Google spends its crawl on junk parameter URLs and filtered pages, your new products can sit undiscovered for weeks. Log file analysis shows exactly which URLs Googlebot hits and how often, and it often reveals crawl waste you would never spot otherwise.
Site speed and Core Web Vitals
Speed is a ranking factor and, more honestly, a conversion factor. Google measures three Core Web Vitals, and you want to keep each in the green:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): the main content should load in under 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): the page should respond to taps and clicks in under 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): keep visual movement under 0.1 so buttons do not jump as things load.
Run a few key pages through PageSpeed Insights and look at the field data, not just the lab score. Field data is what real visitors experienced over the last 28 days. The usual fixes are compressing images and serving them in WebP, removing render blocking scripts, setting explicit width and height on images, and cutting the weight of your theme. On WordPress, a caching plugin and a content delivery network handle a good chunk of this before you touch code.
Test the pages that matter, not just the home page. Your money pages are often product or service pages loaded with images and tracking scripts, and they tend to be slower than the home page you keep checking. A fast home page and a sluggish checkout is a common and expensive blind spot.
Make sure Google can render the page
Google indexes the mobile version of your site first. Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console, fetch a live page, and view the rendered HTML and screenshot. If your main content only appears after JavaScript runs and Google cannot see it in the rendered output, you have a problem worth fixing fast.
Sites built on heavy JavaScript frameworks are the usual suspects. If content depends on client side rendering, look at server side rendering or prerendering so the important text and links exist in the raw HTML. Test on a real phone too. Tap targets crammed too close together, text that needs pinching to read, buttons that move as the page loads, and content hidden behind slow scripts all hurt you on mobile.
Internal links and site structure
Crawlers move through your site by following links, so your structure decides what gets found and how much weight it carries. A flat structure where any page is three clicks from the home page tends to work better than a deep maze.
Crawl your site with Screaming Frog or a similar tool and look for:
- Orphan pages that no internal link points to, which Google may never find.
- Pages buried five or six clicks deep that deserve to be closer to the top.
- Broken internal links returning 404s.
- Redirect chains where one URL bounces through two or three hops before landing.
Fix the chains so each old URL points straight to the final destination with a single 301. Add internal links from strong pages to the ones you want to lift. This is slow, unglamorous work that moves rankings more reliably than almost anything else.
Canonicals, redirects, and duplicate content
Duplicate content rarely earns a penalty, but it splits your signals and wastes crawl budget. Ecommerce and filter driven sites suffer the most, since one product can sit behind a dozen URLs with different sort and filter parameters.
Set a self referencing canonical tag on pages you want indexed, and point variant URLs back to the main version. When you move or delete a page, use a 301 redirect, not a 302, unless the change is genuinely temporary. Confirm the site resolves on one version only. The http URLs should redirect to https, and you should pick either the www or the plain domain and send the other to it. Small conflicts here confuse crawlers for months.
Structured data that earns rich results
Schema markup does not lift rankings on its own, but it can win you rich results that pull more clicks. Add the types that match your content. Product and review markup for shop pages. FAQ markup for support content. LocalBusiness markup with your address and hours for a physical location. Article markup for blog posts.
Use JSON-LD, keep the markup honest so it matches what a visitor sees, and validate every template with the Rich Results Test. Marking up prices or reviews that do not appear on the page is the fast way to a manual action, so do not do it.
Breadcrumb schema is worth adding on almost any site, since it changes how your URL shows in results and reinforces your structure. If you publish how to guides or recipes, those have their own schema types with their own rich results. Check Google’s list of supported types and match what you actually have, rather than adding markup for its own sake.
How a technical SEO audit comes together
Run through the checklist above and you have done most of what a paid technical seo audit covers. The order matters. Fix indexing before speed, because there is no point making an uncrawlable page load quickly. We usually spend the first week crawling, pulling Search Console data, and mapping every issue by how much traffic it touches and how hard it is to fix. High impact and low effort items go first.
Technical SEO is not a one time cleanup either. Themes update, plugins change their output, and a developer pushes a fix on Friday that adds a noindex tag by accident. Build a few habits so problems surface in days, not quarters:
- Check the Search Console index report once a month and watch for sudden drops.
- Turn on email alerts for coverage errors and manual actions.
- Where to go from here
If you want a team that treats this as part of the build rather than an afterthought, GAP3 can help. See how we approach technical SEO services, or tell us about your site and we will reply within one business day.
