A technical SEO audit is the process of analyzing the technical aspects of your website to identify and address issues with its structure or coding that are hurting your ranking potential.  This audit determines whether you need to perform specific actions to improve your site’s performance.
With the help of our experts, we’ll explore what a technical SEO audit entails, how it works, as well as when and how to perform one. We’ll also highlight the best tools to use for an effective audit.
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What Is a Technical SEO Audit?

A technical SEO audit is an analysis of your website to ensure that search engine spiders can easily crawl and index it. This audit can be performed manually or with software.  It also identifies potential issues that could be holding back your organic search performance and ranking in search results. 
Once the audit is complete, you’ll get a technical SEO audit report detailing the findings and recommendations for improving your website's SEO. 
What Does a Technical SEO Audit Involve?
A technical audit can be as broad or as narrow as you need it to be. If you’re unsure about which areas to audit, consider consulting with a specialist. Generally, a thorough technical SEO audit should include: 
- Accessibility and visibility for search engines
- JavaScript and CSS components 
- Indexing and canonical URLs
- Loading external resources
- Optimizing image files
- Mobile-friendliness
- Structured data
- Core Web Vitals
- Page load time
- Redirects and SSL
How To Perform a Technical SEO Audit in 5 Steps
To ensure your website is well-positioned for SEO success, follow these essential steps for conducting a technical SEO audit: 
- Check your site’s health
- Analyze your site’s structure
- Evaluate your site’s content
- Check your site’s speed
- Improve your mobile experience
Step #1: Check Your Site’s Health
The first step in any technical SEO audit is to assess the health of your website, specifically its crawlability.  Check whether search engine bots can access your site and determine whether it’s good for traffic.
Here’s how to do this:
- Start by checking your robots.txt file. This file tells crawlers which parts of your site should be crawled, and which shouldn’t.
- To find the robots.txt file, simply type in your website and add robots.txt as a slug. It should go like this: ‘Yoursitename.com/robots.txt’
- This will give you a list of all allowed and disallowed pages where bots can crawl. Proper use of the robots.txt file helps deflect bots from accessing private folders and saves server resources. It’s best to allow bots to crawl your sitemap and restrict access to the backend.
- Ensure your sitemap is included in the robots.txt file. This is crucial for helping search engines find your sites, crawl them, and potentially, rank them.
- To check your robots.txt file and make edits, you can use online tools like Ahrefs or Google Console.
Step #2: Analyze Your Site’s Structure
After checking your site’s health, the next step is to analyze its structure.  This includes looking at your site's hierarchy, navigation, and URL structure to identify any areas that may need improvement. An organized site structure is crucial for both user experience and search engine optimization.
Here’s what to focus on:
- Site hierarchy: Ensure that every page on your website is structured in an organized and logical hierarchy. Pages should be arranged in an understandable way with subfolders and subdomains, so crawl engines can navigate your site easily.
- Navigation: Your site’s navigation should be user-friendly and intuitive. Both bots and users should be able to move easily from page to page.
- URL structure: Your URLs should be easy to follow. Every URL should match the search intent and menu navigation. For example, if you’re looking for a trowel on a home appliances site, the URL should go according to the menu, i.e.:
Menu: Homepage > Garden Tools > Trowels
URL: yoursitesname.com/garden-tools/trowels
By focusing on these elements, you can identify and address any structural issues that may hinder your site’s crawlability and user experience.
Step #3: Evaluate Your Site’s Content
Your next step is to evaluate the quality and quantity of your site’s content — both the text as well as any images or videos you may have.  For this, you need a good SEO content strategy.
You should focus on your content’s:
- Quality: Your content must be well-written, free of spelling and grammatical errors, and relevant to your target keyword. It should be high-quality, informative, and relevant to your site's overall topic.
- Quantity: You should have enough content to keep users engaged.  According to Wix, the optimal word count ranges between 1,500 to 2,500 words, but don’t take this for granted. Instead, test different lengths and analyze how your content is performing. Depending on your niche, the opportunity might call for shorter or longer blog posts. 
- Posting frequency: Regularly add new content to keep your users engaged and to show search engines that your site is active.
- Uniqueness: Check whether there’s duplicate content — sites with the same or similar content. If overlooked, it can lead to problems like incorrect page display on SERPs or indexing problems.
- On-page SEO elements: Check on-page SEO elements like metadata, page titles, and internal and external linking. Internal linking is especially important for your site architecture, while external builds ranking. Tools like Google Search Console and Yoast SEO can help streamline this process.
In evaluating your content, consider the following questions:
- What topics are my readers most interested in?
- Which pages are the most and least popular?
- Are there any broken links on my site?
- What keywords am I ranking for?
- Is my site mobile-friendly?
Step #4: Check Your Site’s Speed

Website speed is one of the ranking factors on desktops and mobile searches. A fast website is essential for a good user experience, and it can also help you rank higher in search results.
When conducting your technical SEO audit, make sure you check two things:
- Website speed: How long it takes for your website to load.
- Page speed: How long it takes for a single page on your site to load.
 There are a few different ways to check your site's speed:
- One option is to use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool. This tool will give you a score for the mobile and desktop versions of your site, as well as some specific recommendations on how to improve your site's speed. 
- Another option is to use WebPagetest. It provides a detailed analysis of your site's loading time, including information on each element that makes up your page. 
Once you know where your site needs improvement, there are a few simple steps you can take to speed it up, such as: 
- Optimizing images (image size, broken images, missing alt text, etc.)
- Minifying CSS and JavaScript files
- Reducing redirects
Step #5: Improve Your Mobile Experience
With mobile traffic now accounting for over half of all web traffic, it’s only logical to optimize your website for mobile devices. 
Google's algorithms take mobile experience into account when ranking websites, so if your website isn't mobile-friendly, you're likely losing valuable traffic.  Fortunately, you can take a few key steps to improve your mobile experience:
- Optimize loading speed: Ensure your website loads quickly on mobile devices; 53% of users will likely abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. You can speed up your website by optimizing images and using a content delivery network.
- Design for mobile: Consider the design of your website. All content you have must be easy to read on a small screen, and users should be able to navigate your site without a hitch.
- Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test: This tool can assess how well your site works on mobile devices. It categorizes pages as “Usable” and “Not Usable” on mobile and provides guidelines on how to improve mobile usability.
Additional tools like Ahrefs can also help compare your desktop and mobile sites to see if specific problems affect your mobile experience.
When Should You Perform a Technical SEO Audit?
The frequency of technical SEO audits depends on the size and complexity of your website. For a small website with only a handful of pages, auditing once per year might be sufficient.  However, for a large website with hundreds or even thousands of pages, you may need to conduct monthly audits. 
However, several factors could require you to perform an audit:
- If you're making major changes to your website such as a redesign, you should perform an audit immediately after to ensure everything is functioning correctly.
- If you're noticing a decline in your organic traffic, you should conduct a technical SEO audit to pinpoint and address the underlying issues. 
- If you’re launching a new website, you should conduct an audit prior to launch to ensure everything is set up correctly.
Ultimately, there's no hard-set rule for how often you should perform a technical SEO audit.  However, by monitoring your website closely and being aware of any changes or potential problems, you can ensure your site remains well-optimized for search engines, helping to drive continuous growth in organic traffic.
Technical SEO Audit Checklist
When conducting a technical SEO audit, it’s important you don’t miss any steps. To help ensure a thorough process, having a detailed checklist is essential. With the help of our experts, we’ve compiled just the thing:
- Check your website’s traffic
- Run a full-site crawl
- Improve on-page SEO elements (metadata, images, keywords in title tags and headings, etc.)
- Check for broken internal links
- Include at least five internal links
- Fix broken external links
- Check your page hierarchy
- Review your sitemap
- Optimize your sites for Google’s featured snippets
- See if all your pages have been properly indexed
- Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
- Check that your website and all pages load fast — 3 seconds is the average!
- Make sure you don’t have duplicate content
- Improve your content and ensure it’s optimized for mobile
- Include images in your content with keywords in the alt text
- Track the keywords you’re ranking for
- Analyze the topical relevance and authority of your website
Top 5 Tools for Performing a Technical SEO Audit
The best tools for performing technical SEO audits are easy to use, have a great user interface, offer a wide range of features, and support SEO automation. 
While Ahrefs is the top choice for analyzing backlinks, domains, and content, as well as employing features like keyword discovery and link analysis, here are other options to consider:
1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is by far the most popular tool for tracking your site's performance and ranking in search. It provides information about your website's number of impressions and clicks, as well as its average position in Google search results.  Additionally, Google Search Console can be used to submit sitemaps and test robots.txt files.
The tool helps you answer questions like:
- How many unique visitors do I have each month?
- Do my pages get indexed correctly?
- How frequently am I crawling my site?
- What does it take for a page to show up in Google's search results?
Moreover, Google Search Console lets you find long-tail keywords in seconds, as well as see which pages are ranking for specific keywords in your niche. It also provides data on how many organic clicks each page gets, whether it's been indexed by Google, and whether it has been optimized for mobile devices.
In addition to these metrics, it also provides information about the percentage of queries that returned relevant results, bounce rate, and of course, the technical quality of your site's content. For example, you can see if your website has any broken links or if pages have redirects from one page to another — indicating they're not optimized well enough.
GSC is a 100% free solution. 
2. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a desktop program you can use for technical SEO audits. It's available for Mac, PC, and Linux. 
The program crawls websites' links, images, CSS, scripts, and apps to find errors in your code and provide data on website health, which is an essential part of a technical SEO audit.  This information can then be used to identify potential issues with your website.
The tool also allows you to check for broken links and redirects, which is useful for finding duplicate content.  You can also use Screaming Frog to check for duplicated SQL queries and other common problems found within your website's code.
Screaming Frog crawls the entire website, including all subdomains, so there is no need to worry about crawling in the wrong places or not being able to see certain pages. The tool even works across multiple domains!
Once Screaming Frog has crawled a site, it provides an HTML report showing all of the issues found during the crawl process.  You can export this data into Excel or Google Sheets for analysis. 
The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs per website, while the paid version starts at $259 per year and gives you unlimited crawling and bonus features. 
3. Lumar

Lumar, previously known as DeepCrawl, is a technical SEO auditing tool that helps you with crawling and indexation. It’s one of the favorite tools for auditing a website's technical setup. 
Lumar is a web-based application you can use to crawl websites of any size, trusted by some of the biggest brands in the world, including PayPal, Microsoft, and Adobe. It's easy to use and provides a wealth of data on how to improve your website's SEO. 
This tool works similarly to Screaming Frog, but it offers more features and flexibility. It allows you to crawl websites and collect data about the URLs, titles, metadata, and other elements on each page. However, it also offers more advanced features, such as creating custom reports and exporting data into Excel.
For example, let's say you want to know why your blog posts aren't ranking on Google. You could look at your blog's analytics data, but it would take hours of manual labor and leave you with more questions than answers. Instead, Lumar can crawl through your entire website and identify all the technical issues that are slowing down your site's performance — and then suggest fixes for each issue.
Lumar crawls through all your pages in the XML sitemap, images, CSS files, and other static content.  It crawls and analyzes millions of pages at speeds of up to 450 URLs/second. You can then rely on 200+ built-in reports or get any other metric you’d need with custom extractions. 
Lumar’s pricing options are available upon request.
4. Xenu's Link Sleuth

Link Sleuth is a free, standalone tool that crawls your website and checks for broken links.  It produces a report listing all the broken links on your site and the pages where they're located. Link Sleuth is simple to use and highly effective, making it a valuable tool for any technical SEO audit.
This free tool is only compatible with Windows devices.
5. W3C Markup Validation Service

The W3C Markup Validation Service is a free online tool used to check if a web page is properly formatted according to HTML or XHTML standards.  It helps you check the markup of your web pages for technical SEO audits. 
Simply enter the URL of your page into the service, and it will analyze the code to find any errors. If there are, the service will provide a list of them, along with information on how to fix them.  In addition to finding errors in your code, the W3C Markup Validation Service can also help improve your website's performance and compliance with web standards.
As for cost, the tool is completely free!
Technical SEO Audit: Key Takeaways
Technical SEO is one of the most important parts of SEO.  Auditing your site ensures that your site is optimally configured for search engines. Without regular audits, all your SEO efforts could go to waste — and that’s a risk you shouldn’t take. That's why a technical SEO audit should be at the top of your to-do list.
If you’re just starting out, partner with a small business SEO company or an established SEO agency to ensure your website is optimized for search engines and set up for long-term success!