What a technical SEO audit checks, and what it should not

A technical SEO audit should answer one question: why isn't Google showing your site to the people searching for what you do? Everything in it should either answer that question or tell you what to fix first. If a finding does neither, it doesn't belong in the report.

This is how we run the audit behind our technical and on-page SEO work, and what we deliberately leave out.

What is a technical SEO audit, in plain terms?

It's a check of whether search engines can find, read and understand your website. Content and reputation matter too, but they can't help a page Google never sees. The technical layer comes first because it's the floor everything else stands on.

A good audit ends with a ranked list, not a pile of warnings. Most crawling tools can produce hundreds of "issues" for an ordinary small business site. The skill is in deciding which three actually matter.

Can Google find and index your pages?

This is the first thing we check, because nothing else matters if the answer is no. We crawl the whole site the way a search engine would, then compare what we found with what Google says it has indexed in Search Console.

The gaps tell the story. Common ones:

• Pages that exist but aren't indexed, often because nothing links to them.
• Pages blocked by robots.txt that the owner expected to rank.
• A noindex tag left over from when the site was built.
• Duplicate versions of the same page competing with each other.

One misunderstanding comes up often. Blocking a page in robots.txt doesn't reliably keep it out of Google, and it can stop Google from seeing the noindex tag that would. If you want a page out of the results, noindex is the tool. The robots.txt file controls crawling, not indexing.

Does the site work on a phone?

Google mostly uses the mobile version of your site to decide how to index and rank it. So we audit the phone experience first, not as an afterthought.

That means checking that the mobile version carries the same content as the desktop one, that buttons are big enough to tap, and that the thing a customer most wants, usually your phone number or a booking button, is easy to reach.

Is the site fast enough?

We look at Core Web Vitals, Google's three measures of loading, responsiveness and visual stability. A page passes when it loads its main content within 2.5 seconds, responds to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and doesn't jump around while loading.

We judge speed on real visitor data first. Search Console reports it when your site has enough traffic. Lab tests like Lighthouse come second, once we know a page is slow and need to find out why. A lab score on its own can point you at problems your real visitors never have.

Can Google understand what each page is about?

Being indexed isn't the same as being understood. We check the parts of each page that tell search engines what it covers:

• A title and meta description written for the search you want to rank for.
• One clear main heading, with the rest of the headings in order.
• Structured data that describes your business accurately, so search engines and AI tools read your details exactly.
• Internal links that make your important pages easy to reach in a click or two.

This is also where we look for service pages that don't exist. A business offering five services with one page that lists them all will usually lose to a competitor with a page for each.

What does the audit actually hand back?

Three things, in this order.

First, one sentence naming the real reason the site isn't being found. It might be a technical block, missing pages, or a site Google simply doesn't trust yet. Writing it as one sentence forces us to commit, and it gives you something to hold us to.

Second, every finding ranked by how much it matters, how much work it is, and how sure we are that fixing it will help. The easy, high-value fixes go to the top.

Third, what we'd fix in the first two weeks. That's the part you can act on straight away, whether or not you hire us. If you'd like us to do the work, our technical SEO service starts from exactly this list.

What should an audit leave out?

A useful audit stays short. Ours deliberately leaves out:

• A full content strategy. Working out what to write takes research into your customers and competitors that a free audit can't cover properly.
• A keyword export dressed up as analysis. A spreadsheet of search terms with no recommendation attached isn't advice.
• A sales proposal. If you want one after reading the audit, ask. It shouldn't be the point of the document.

We also avoid scoring the site out of 100. A single score hides the one finding that matters behind fifty that don't.

How do you know the audit was worth it?

You should be able to read the first page and know what's wrong and what to do next. If you need a call to understand it, it wasn't written well enough.

The findings should also hold up when someone else checks them. Everything we report comes from a tool you can look at yourself: the crawl, Search Console, or real speed data. Nothing depends on taking our word for it.

If you'd like to see what one looks like for your site, send us your URL. And if you want to know what happens after the audit, the technical and on-page SEO page covers the first three months.