Neil Patel

How to Complete a Comprehensive Technical SEO Site Audit in 9 Easy Steps

Neil Patel

Are you confident in your website’s technical health? Here’s why I’m asking:

Over 3.5 billion Google searches occur every day, and up to 99 percent of searchers stick to page one.  

That means you aren’t getting traffic if you’re not showing up on the front page of the SERPs. This is where a technical SEO audit comes in. 

Finding and fixing technical issues can increase organic traffic by making pages more discoverable and improving your crawl budget. 

You can also spot broken links, optimize for mobile friendliness, and speed things up a notch. All of these actions help your website’s SEO and aid visibility in the SERPs. And isn’t that what every website owner wants? 

That’s why I’m walking you through a tech SEO audit step by step. Let’s get started.

Key Takeaways

Table of Contents

What Is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO site audit is an essential part of your website maintenance. It involves fine-tuning the technical elements of your website and ensuring it’s well-optimized for search engines and users alike.

Audits look at the key technical areas that can improve your site’s performance in search engines. These include page load speeds, canonical tags, and schema markup, to name a few.

Technical SEO also includes ensuring your website is accessible to search engine crawlers and users. If your website has broken links or coding issues, Google will have a hard time indexing it, which can result in lower search rankings.

SEO technical site audits are a great way to create actionable plans to outperform your competitors, identify opportunities within your website, find and fix exit points, and create better customer experiences.

In addition to a technical SEO audit, you should also regularly perform on-page SEO audits and off-page SEO audits, Here’s an example of what each audit covers.

Use a UX audit too for a complete picture.

What Are the Key Elements of a Technical SEO Audit?

There are three key factors to look at during a technical SEO audit:

Sometimes, you won’t have the time to address each issue, so use the 80/20 rule. The gist is that 20 percent of your invested input is responsible for 80 percent of the results obtained. 

How to Conduct a Technical SEO Site Audit

SEO guidelines are constantly changing. Every time a major search engine significantly updates its algorithm, SEO professionals have to adapt.

The good news is that the frequency of changes in technical SEO tends to be lower than that of on-page SEO, for example. That doesn’t mean you don’t need to work on it, though. As a baseline: 

Ready to find out how to conduct a technical SEO site audit? Here are the steps to follow.

1. Crawl Your Website

The first part of the technical SEO audit is making sure your site is crawlable.

Website crawling enables search engines to discover and index your website content. When bots crawl your websites, they analyze the content and its relevance before deciding how to rank it in search results.

A crawl audit can find problems on your site, such as duplicate content, broken links, canonical tag issues, unlinked pagination pages, and excess redirects. 

That’s why you should start crawling your website before you do anything else. You can use Ubersuggest, or tools like ScreamingFrog, Semrush, and Ahrefs to perform a crawl.

Here’s how you use Ubersuggest:

If you find anything here, click on it for more information and advice on how to fix it.

If you don’t use a tool for your technical SEO audit, you can also search parts of your site manually. We’ll explain that below.

A few Google searches can tell you approximately how well your website is ranking by looking at the specific pages that appear in the search results. This will tell you if your site appears first when you search for it by name. 

When analyzing your search results, ask yourself:

This will help you figure out where to start your technical SEO audit.

To determine which pages the search engines are crawling, you can use a “site:rootdomain” search to see what shows up. You can also use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console, the Google Index Checker, or ScreamingFrog to find 404 codes for unindexed pages.

Here’s what this looks like in action:

Note: Using the site command only shows pages on your own site.

3. Make Sure Only One Version of Your Site Is Browsable

If your website has multiple “versions” of itself, you send search engines mixed messages about how to crawl your site.

Basically, the crawlers don’t know which one is the right one.

If search engines don’t know how to show your site to prospective traffic, your SEO ranking will be negatively impacted.

For example, this could be a mobile version and a desktop version that are warring with each other.

Other reasons there may be two browsable sites are:

A good way to manage this issue is by introducing canonical tags. A canonical tag is a piece of code implemented on a specific page to show that that page is the “master copy.” of a given piece of content

4. Conduct On-Page Technical SEO Checks

Is your website letting you down? There’s only one way to find out: running some technical SEO checks, like broken links, URL structures, XML sitemaps, and unindexed pages.

Conducting technical SEO checks will ensure that you’ve optimized your website for search engines for improved online performance. For example, reviewing your sitemap could reveal pages that might be missing or incorrect. Checking for crawl errors might reveal reasons why certain pages on your site don’t appear on SERP results. Let’s dig a little deeper into some major areas to focus on with your checks.

Technical Tags

We mentioned canonical tags as an important item to review before. During a technical check, you want to review the pages you have designated as “canonical” to make sure that the tag is present and doesn’t have any errors.

Along with that, there are other technical tags out there that you should keep an eye out for during this phase of the audit. One such example is robots.txt. This is important because these tags tell search engine crawlers which pages on your site they should focus on crawling, keeping your site from getting overloaded by crawler requests. A technical SEO check helps ensure that all priority pages are up to date in this section.

Clear Hierarchy

You’ll want to organize your content with a clear hierarchy on the page to make it easy for Google to analyze your site and index it for search (for increased visibility).

A basic website layout would look like this:

Essentially, you want to ensure the placement of pages makes sense—all your service pages should be under your “services” tab, for example. Make sure users don’t have to click through four levels of pages to find best-selling products. The goal is to make it easy for Google —and users—to find the information or products they are looking for.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is code you can add to your website to help search engines understand its content. It comes in many formats, like video, recipes, images, listings, and reviews. 

It’s important for technical SEO because it helps search engines return more relevant results for users’ queries.

To check if your website has schema markup, you can use a tool like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Sites with logical hierarchies have improved SEO rankings. That’s why checking your internal and external links is important. Doing so helps ensure visitors can navigate your site intuitively.

During your technical SEO audit, tools like Screaming Frog can help you identify the broken links and redirect loops on your site. Once you download it, add your URL in the text bar at the top of the page and click “Start.” In this example, I used Starbucks.com:

The tool then begins testing all your site links and provides you with the results. You can then filter the results to see specific data. I chose ‘Links’ from the top menu left, where you see detailed information about the status of your links, and ‘Issues’ from the top menu right, showing where the problems are (the specific URLs will populate in the left window when you select an issue on the right):

You’ll want to change any links marked in red, as these dead ends can negatively impact your technical SEO.

6. Check Your Site Speed

Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics measure your site’s user-friendliness, including page load times (the time it takes to load fully). 

There are three main metrics: 

The lower your scores are, the better. For your LCP, for example, you’re looking for a score of 2.5.

Load times are critical because they can impact the user experience. For example, say you’ve got a button on your website that moves when users try to click on it. 

Factors like large videos and images, slow server response times, third-party scripts, and lack of caching can all contribute to slow-loading websites. 

Ubersuggest can help test site speed. Here’s how:

7. Leverage Your Analytics and Compare Site Metrics

This step determines whether your analytics service (e.g., Google Analytics) is reporting live metric data.

If it is, you know the tracker code is installed correctly.

If not, your code needs to be installed correctly and fixed.

If you’re using Google Analytics, the tracker code is placed above the header of each web page.

Once you have an analytics service up and running, compare the metric data to the results of your earlier “site:rootdomain” search.

The number of pages showing in your metric data should be similar to the number of pages from the “site:rootdomain” search.

If not, certain pages aren’t accepting crawl requests properly or may not be indexed.

8. Look at Your Site’s Mobile Responsiveness

You can put all the effort in the world into your technical SEO audit, but it’s all for naught if your site isn’t mobile-friendly.

Mobile responsiveness is valuable for SEO because search engines like Google prioritize mobile-friendly websites in the SERPs.

That’s because with almost 59% of global web traffic coming through mobile (and that number growing), Google has pivoted to do 100% of all crawling with mobile Googlebot. Failing to have a site that runs well on mobile hinders your efforts right from the start.

It boils down to this: If your site doesn’t perform well on mobile devices, you are not only losing traffic; your site also looks bad to Google. 

Want to know how you’re doing?

Small SEO Tools, SEOptimer, and Pingdom all check your site’s mobile responsiveness. 

If your site needs some work, read my post about how to optimize for mobile search.

9. Look For Code Problems

During your technical SEO audit, you’re almost guaranteed to find coding problems, such as missing or incorrect canonical tags, poorly implemented hreflang tags, and meta tags. 

Fortunately, many of these problems are easy to spot and fix.

FAQs

What am I looking for in a technical SEO audit?

When performing a technical SEO audit, you should look for any issues hindering your website’s ranking in the SERPs. This includes things that hinder your site speed performance and security issues.

Is there a difference between a technical site audit and a technical SEO audit?

A technical site audit is a broad overview of your website’s technical health. A technical SEO audit is more focused on your website’s SEO and how you can improve it.

Both audits are important for ensuring that your website is healthy and performs well in search engines.

What are some common technical SEO issues?

Some common technical SEO issues include things that lower site speed, including:

  • Uncompressed images
  • Unused Javascript/HTML/CSS
  • Unestablished preconnections

Other good starting points for your technical SEO audit include navigation issues, broken redirects, or unoptimized URLs

Conclusion

There are three aspects of SEO: On-page, off-page, and technical SEO.

It won’t matter how amazing your on-page SEO is if you fail at technical SEO.

It also won’t matter how great you are at off-page SEO if you’re horrible at the technical stuff.

You know why? Because without a solid approach to technical SEO, the search engines can’t crawl your websites or index your pages, customers will find your website hard to navigate, and pages can take too long to load. But don’t get overwhelmed by the idea of it being “technical” or complex. Start with the big, critical aspects discussed above and tackle them one problem at a time.

Grow your traffic

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