How to run a technical SEO audit in five steps
Most technical audits fail for the same reason: they produce a 200-row spreadsheet that nobody can prioritise. A useful audit answers three questions in order — can search engines reach the pages, can they understand them, and is anything actively wasting the crawl budget you have. Here is the five-step sequence we run on every new engagement.
1. Crawl the site the way a search engine does
Start with a full crawl using a desktop crawler, rendering JavaScript, and compare the result with what your analytics and sitemap claim exists. The gap between those three lists is where most problems live: orphaned pages nobody links to, sitemap URLs that redirect, templates that only render for logged-in users.
Pay attention to response codes in bulk rather than individually. A handful of 404s is housekeeping; a pattern of 404s coming from one template is a bug worth fixing before anything else.
2. Check indexation against intent
For every significant template, ask whether it should be indexed at all. Faceted navigation, internal search results, tag archives and paginated series are the usual suspects — they inflate the index with pages that will never earn a click and dilute the signals of the pages that could.
3. Measure performance where users actually are
Lab tools are diagnostic, field data is the verdict. Pull your Core Web Vitals from real-user data segmented by template and device, then use lab testing to explain the worst offenders. A category page that is slow on mid-range Android is a business problem; a homepage that scores well in a lab on fibre is not evidence of anything.
4. Audit internal linking and site structure
Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever most sites never pull. Map how many clicks from the homepage each priority page sits at, and how many internal links point to it. Pages that matter commercially should not be four clicks deep with three links pointing at them.
Look for hub pages that could consolidate thin, overlapping content, and for old posts that would happily link to newer commercial pages if anyone edited them.
5. Validate structured data and rendering
Confirm that key templates output valid structured data and that critical content is present in the rendered HTML, not injected after user interaction. Then re-test a sample of URLs as the search engine renders them — what the crawler sees is the only version that counts.
Turn the findings into a sequence
Finish by scoring each issue on impact and effort, then commit to an order. Two well-chosen fixes shipped this month beat forty logged in a document nobody opens. If you want a second opinion on where your own site sits, we are happy to take a look.