The Beginner's Guide to a Technical SEO Audit (With Free Checklist)

Technical SEO is the foundation everything else stands on. Great content can't rank if Google can't crawl, render and understand your site. The good news? A solid first-pass audit takes an afternoon with free tools. Here's the checklist our team uses.

Step 1: Is Google Crawling You? (GSC)

Connect your site to Google Search Console — it's free and non-negotiable. Check the "Pages" report: how many pages are indexed? If Google has indexed far fewer pages than your site has, something is blocking them. Look at the "Page indexing" reasons for the answer (404s, noindex tags, redirects, etc.).

Step 2: Check Your Robots.txt and Sitemap

Your robots.txt should allow crawling and ideally point to your sitemap: https://yoursite.com/robots.txt then check https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml exists and lists only pages you actually want indexed. A sitemap is like a map you hand Google of the pages that matter.

Step 3: Look for Broken Links and 404s

Broken internal links waste crawl budget and annoy users. Use GSC's coverage report or a free crawler like Screaming Frog (up to 500 URLs free) to export all 404s. Fix them with redirects to the closest relevant page.

Step 4: Audit Page Speed (Core Web Vitals)

Run PageSpeed Insights on your three most important pages. Focus on LCP (under 2.5s), INP (under 200ms) and CLS (under 0.1). Common culprits: unoptimized images, too many scripts, no browser caching. Most sites can pass after image compression and a caching plugin.

Step 5: Verify a Mobile-Friendly Experience

Google crawls mobile-first. Open your site on a phone: is text readable without zooming? Do buttons have enough spacing? Does anything overflow the screen? If your design is responsive (this website is), you're most of the way there.

Step 6: Check Titles, Meta Descriptions and Canonicals

Use a crawler to export every page's title and description. Flag: duplicates, missing tags, titles over 60 characters. Also check every page has a self-referencing canonical — it's your "this page's official URL" signal.

Step 7: Add Structured Data (Schema)

Schema helps Google understand your content and can win you rich results (stars, FAQ boxes, breadcrumbs). Start with Organization, Article, BreadcrumbList — and LocalBusiness if you serve a local area. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test.