A technical SEO audit finds what stops Google reading your site.

A technical SEO audit inspects whether search engines can reach, load, read and index every page that matters, which has to happen before a page can rank, and delivers a ranked list of problems with the evidence for each. I run it as one part of a Scientific SEO Audit. Carrying out the repairs and keeping the site healthy afterward is ongoing technical SEO, which is separate work.

What gets checked

The audit follows the route Google takes, from finding a URL to storing the page. Crawling comes first: whether the robots.txt file (the file that tells crawlers where they may go) blocks anything it shouldn’t, and whether every important page can be reached by following links. Then the server’s responses, where I look for broken pages, chains of redirects, and pages that return an error code.

Next are the indexing and crawling signals: stray noindex tags, canonical tags (the tag that names the preferred version of a page) pointing at the wrong URL, and duplicate versions of one page. I check rendering: whether text and links are in the page’s HTML or appear only after JavaScript runs, which makes them slower and less certain to be read. I look at how pages load and display on a phone, since Google indexes the mobile version of a site. Last is structured data: whether schema markup is present, valid and consistent with what the page says.

How the evidence is gathered

A crawler following links from the home page produces one list of URLs. The sitemap gives a second, the pages the site says exist. The third, if you give me view access, is what Google reports it has indexed. On a healthy site the lists roughly agree, and I look for problems where they differ: pages in the sitemap that nothing links to, service pages that are linked and listed yet not indexed.

How findings are ranked

I rank each finding by what it costs you.

Automated tools report all three levels in one list, which is how a sound site ends up with an alarming score. I list housekeeping items so you know I saw them, with a note that they can wait. I also mark each fix as a setting or a job for a developer.

What the audit doesn’t include

A clean result means Google can read the site. Whether Google ranks it depends on what the pages say and how the business compares with its competitors. Judging whether your pages say the right things belongs to the content audit, and how AI assistants describe your company belongs to the AI visibility audit.

When a technical audit is worth ordering

Order one when a redesign or a move to a new platform is followed by a fall in traffic, or when new pages never appear in Google. The other good moment is just before a rebuild starts, when the audit doubles as a list of what the new site must preserve, the core of site migrations.

If the site has been stable for years and its pages are indexed, the technical part is less likely to be where your calls are going.