Technical SEO audit: 15 checks before you spend on links

Before investing in content and link building, make sure the foundation is solid. A technical problem — pages blocked from indexing, slow templates, broken redirects — can quietly cancel out months of good work. These are the 15 checks we run at the start of every SEO engagement.

Crawling and indexing

1. Robots.txt: make sure you are not accidentally blocking important sections, CSS or JavaScript files.
2. Noindex tags: look for stray noindex directives left over from development or staging.
3. XML sitemap: it should list only live, indexable, canonical URLs — and be submitted in Search Console.
4. Search Console page indexing report: review why pages are not indexed. "Crawled – currently not indexed" often points to thin or duplicate content.
5. Canonical tags: each page should point to itself or to the correct preferred version, never to a redirect or a 404.

Site structure

6. Click depth: important pages should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage.
7. Internal links: find orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them and connect them to related content.
8. Redirects: fix redirect chains and loops; update internal links to point directly at the final URL.
9. Broken links and 404s: fix or redirect broken internal links, especially from high-traffic pages.

Performance and experience

10. Core Web Vitals: check Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights.
11. Images: serve modern formats such as WebP, set width and height attributes, and lazy-load below-the-fold images.
12. Mobile experience: test key templates on real phones — tap targets, font sizes, pop-ups and forms.
13. HTTPS: every URL should load securely, with no mixed-content warnings.

On-page technical signals

14. Titles and headings: every indexable page needs a unique title tag and one clear H1. Duplicates confuse search engines and users.
15. Structured data: add relevant schema — Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article, FAQ where appropriate — and validate it with the Rich Results Test.

How to prioritise the fixes

You will usually find more issues than you can fix at once. Score each one by impact (how many important pages it affects) and effort (developer time needed). Fix high-impact, low-effort issues first: an accidental noindex on your service pages is a five-minute fix that can matter more than months of link building.

Re-audit regularly

Websites change constantly — new pages, plugins, redesigns, CMS updates. Run a crawl monthly and a full audit every quarter, and check Search Console's indexing and Core Web Vitals reports weekly. Technical SEO is not a one-off project; it is maintenance that protects everything else you invest in.