"Technical SEO audit" means different things to different agencies, and a lot of what gets delivered under that name is a broken-link report with a logo on it. Here's what we think actually belongs in one, and why each piece matters.
Crawlability and indexation first
Before anything else: can search engines actually reach and index your important pages? This means checking robots.txt for accidental blocks, confirming your sitemap reflects reality, and reviewing Search Console's coverage report for pages that should be indexed but aren't — or pages that are indexed but shouldn't be.
Canonical and duplicate content review
Inconsistent or missing canonical tags are one of the most common issues we find on sites that have gone through a redesign or migration. Every indexable page needs a single, clear, self-referencing canonical URL — not a canonical pointing to a staging domain or a different page entirely.
Site architecture and internal linking
A technical audit should map how link equity flows through your site. Orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them are effectively invisible to search engines, no matter how good the content is.
Core Web Vitals, not just a PageSpeed score
A single PageSpeed Insights score is a starting point, not the full picture. A real audit looks at Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and Interaction to Next Paint across your actual highest-traffic pages, on real-world mobile connections, not just a lab test on desktop.
Redirect chains and broken links
This is the part most audits do cover, and it still matters: multi-hop redirect chains waste crawl budget and slow down users, and broken internal links quietly erode both user experience and link equity distribution.
Structured data validation
Schema markup that doesn't validate — or worse, describes content that isn't actually visible on the page — can do more harm than having no schema at all. A proper audit validates every schema type against the current guidelines and the actual page content.
Mobile usability under real conditions
Beyond "is it responsive," a real audit checks tap target sizing, viewport configuration, and whether any content is clipped or overlapping at common device breakpoints — not just whether the layout technically reflows.
What a good audit ends with
A technical SEO audit worth paying for ends with a prioritized list — not a 200-item spreadsheet with no ranking of what actually matters. The goal is a clear answer to "what do we fix first, and why," not just an inventory of every possible issue.