Blog

Technical SEO audit… yeah, the phrase itself sounds complicated. When people hear it, they usually imagine developers staring at code all day or some SEO expert running 20 different tools.

But honestly, it’s not that dramatic.

How to Conduct Technical SEO Audit on Your Website might sound like a very technical topic, but in reality it’s mostly about checking whether your site is healthy for search engines. Think of it like taking your website to a doctor. Everything might look okay from the outside, but internally there could be small issues — broken pages, slow loading speed, indexing problems, weird redirects, stuff like that.

And those small issues can quietly destroy your rankings.

I’ve seen websites with great content that just refuse to rank. Not because the articles were bad… but because technically the site was kind of a mess.

So in this guide, we’ll go through How to Conduct Technical SEO Audit on Your Website step by step, in a simple and practical way. No complicated jargon or overly technical stuff.

First thing… understand what technical SEO actually means

Before jumping into tools, it’s good to understand what we’re even checking.

Technical SEO mainly comes down to three things:

• Can search engines crawl your site
• Can they index your pages
• Does the site load properly and fast

If Google cannot crawl your website properly, then honestly nothing else matters much. You could write the best article ever and it still might never appear in search results.

So the goal of a technical audit is basically making sure Google can easily access and understand your website.

Step 1: Check if Google is indexing your pages

This is the simplest check and takes like 10 seconds.

Go to Google and type this:

site:yourdomain.com

This will show the pages Google has indexed.

Now compare that number with how many pages your website actually has.

Sometimes you notice weird things like:

• Your website has 100 pages but only 20 are indexed
• Or the opposite… Google indexed 500 pages even though you only created 80

Both situations are problems.

If pages are missing, they might be blocked or ignored. If too many pages are indexed, then you probably have duplicate URLs, tag pages, or filter pages getting indexed.

Another place to check is Google Search Console. Inside the indexing section you’ll see things like:

• Crawled – currently not indexed
• Duplicate without canonical
• Blocked by robots.txt

These messages look scary at first, but they basically tell you what’s wrong.

Step 2: Crawl your website like Google does

Next step is using a crawler tool.

Tools like:

• Screaming Frog
• Ahrefs Site Audit
• Sitebulb

These tools scan your website the same way search engines do.

When you run a crawl, you’ll probably discover things like:

• Broken links
• Missing page titles
• Duplicate meta descriptions
• Redirect chains
• 404 pages

Honestly, almost every site has these issues. Even big websites.

One common thing I see a lot is broken pages. Someone deletes a page but forgets that other pages still link to it.

So when users click that link… boom, 404 error.

Cleaning these things up makes your website structure much cleaner for search engines.

Also Read: How to Implement E-A-T in Your SEO Strategy (Updated 2026)

Step 3: Check your website speed

Now speed is a big one.

People are impatient online. If your page loads slowly, visitors leave. And when visitors leave quickly, search engines take that as a bad signal.

You can test your speed using tools like:

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• GTmetrix
• Lighthouse

These tools measure something called Core Web Vitals.

Don’t worry too much about the complicated names. Basically they measure:

• how fast your page loads
• how quickly it becomes interactive
• whether the layout jumps around while loading

Slow websites usually happen because of things like:

• Huge images
• Too many plugins
• Bad hosting
• Heavy JavaScript

Sometimes just compressing images can make a big difference.

Step 4: Make sure your site works well on mobile

Most people browse the internet using phones now. So Google mostly evaluates the mobile version of your website.

This is called mobile-first indexing.

So if your site looks great on desktop but terrible on mobile… that’s a problem.

You should check things like:

• Text too small to read
• Buttons too close together
• Content wider than screen
• Slow loading on mobile

Google has a Mobile Friendly Test tool that can quickly show if there are issues.

Some older themes or designs struggle here.

Step 5: Check your XML sitemap

Your sitemap is basically a file that tells search engines what pages exist on your website.

Usually it lives here:

yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

During a technical audit you want to check a few things.

First, make sure important pages are included.

Second, make sure useless pages are not included.

Sometimes sitemaps accidentally include pages like:

• Tag pages
• Filter URLs
• Old deleted URLs
• Admin pages

Which obviously shouldn’t be there.

Your sitemap should ideally contain only pages you want indexed.

Step 6: Look at your robots.txt file

The robots.txt file tells search engines what they are allowed to crawl.

You can find it at:

yourdomain.com/robots.txt

Most of the time this file is fine, but occasionally there are mistakes.

For example, sometimes developers accidentally block the entire website with this line:

Disallow: /

Which basically tells search engines:

“Do not crawl anything.”

Yeah… that’s bad.

More commonly though, important folders get blocked accidentally.

So it’s worth checking that this file isn’t stopping search engines from crawling your important content.

Step 7: Watch out for duplicate content

Duplicate content is another technical issue that shows up quite often.

It happens when multiple URLs show basically the same content.

For example:

• example.com/page
• example.com/page/
• example.com/page?ref=twitter
• example.com/page?utm=ads

These might look like the same page to humans but search engines may treat them as separate pages.

This splits ranking signals and confuses search engines.

The usual fix is adding canonical tags, which tell Google which version is the main one.

Step 8: Check internal linking and site structure

Website structure matters more than people think.

Search engines discover pages mainly through links.

So if a page has no internal links pointing to it, it becomes what SEO people call an orphan page.

Orphan pages are harder for search engines to discover.

Ideally your important pages should be reachable within three clicks from the homepage.

If the structure looks like this:

Home → Category → Subcategory → Subsubcategory → Article

Then it might be a bit too deep.

Simple structures usually perform better.

Step 9: Make sure your website uses HTTPS

Security is important now for SEO and user trust.

Websites should use HTTPS encryption, not old HTTP.

Most websites already switched to HTTPS, but sometimes problems still happen.

For example:

• Some pages still load on HTTP
• Mixed content errors
• Incorrect redirects

During an audit, check that all HTTP pages redirect properly to HTTPS.

Also Read: How to Measure the Success of Your SEO Campaign – 2026

Step 10: Check structured data (optional but useful)

Structured data helps search engines understand your content better.

It can also help your pages appear with special features in search results like:

• FAQ snippets
• Star ratings
• Product details

You can test this using Google’s Rich Results Test.

If the structured data is broken or missing, fixing it can sometimes improve visibility.

Step 11: Check redirects

Redirects are normal when pages move.

But too many redirects create problems.

For example:

Page A → Page B → Page C → Page D

This is called a redirect chain and it slows things down.

During an audit it’s good to shorten these chains and redirect directly to the final page.

Conclusion

So basically, a technical SEO audit is just checking whether your website is working properly for search engines. Things like indexing, site speed, mobile friendliness, broken links, and crawl issues can all affect rankings even if your content is good.

You don’t have to fix everything perfectly, just focus on finding the main problems and improving them step by step. Once your website is technically clean, it becomes much easier for search engines to crawl and rank your pages.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)