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How to Run a Basic Technical SEO Audit

Technical SEO issues are invisible to visitors but can quietly cap how well even great content performs — and a site that's hard for search engines to crawl is just as hard for AI systems to use as a source. This checklist covers the highest-impact checks you can run yourself in about two hours.

1. 1

   Check indexing status in Search Console

   In Google Search Console, review the Pages report under Indexing to see how many of your pages are indexed versus excluded, and why. Common issues include pages blocked by robots.txt, marked "noindex" by mistake, or flagged as duplicates of another URL.

2. 2

   Review your sitemap and robots.txt

   Confirm your XML sitemap is up to date, submitted in Search Console, and only includes pages you actually want indexed. Check robots.txt to ensure it isn't accidentally blocking important sections of your site — a single misplaced rule can hide an entire site from search engines.

3. 3

   Test Core Web Vitals

   Run your key pages through PageSpeed Insights to check Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Focus first on your highest-traffic pages — slow or unstable pages here have the biggest impact on both user experience and crawl efficiency.

4. 4

   Check for broken links and redirect chains

   Use a crawling tool — or Search Console's Page Indexing report — to find broken internal links and long redirect chains. Both waste crawl budget and create dead ends for users and bots: fix broken links by updating them, and shorten redirect chains to a single hop.

5. 5

   Verify mobile usability

   Most search and AI traffic is mobile-first. Check that your pages render correctly on mobile devices, with readable text sizes, tappable buttons, and no content that's cut off or overlapping — Google's Mobile-Friendly Test is a quick way to spot obvious issues.

6. 6

   Validate structured data

   Run your key page types — homepage, service pages, FAQ, blog posts — through the Rich Results Test to confirm any schema markup is present and error-free. Missing or broken structured data is one of the most common, and most fixable, technical SEO issues.

7. 7

   Review on-page basics

   Spot-check title tags, meta descriptions, and heading structure (one H1 per page, logical H2/H3 hierarchy) across your most important pages. These remain foundational for both traditional rankings and for AI systems trying to understand what each page is about.

8. 8

   Prioritise and fix issues by impact

   Not every issue needs fixing today. Prioritise by traffic impact: indexing problems on important pages first, then Core Web Vitals issues on high-traffic pages, then broken links and structured data, then on-page polish across the rest of the site.