SEO · 21 Jul 2026 · 9 min read
Inside a Technical SEO Audit: 14 Things We Check First
Crawl budget, Core Web Vitals, schema, and the structural issues that quietly cap a site's ranking ceiling.
A technical SEO audit is not a 40-page report nobody reads. It's a prioritised list of the specific issues stopping search engines from crawling, indexing, and ranking a site the way it should.
We start with crawlability: robots.txt, XML sitemaps, and whether important pages are actually reachable within a few clicks of the homepage. Then indexation — checking for pages blocked by accident, duplicate content, and canonical tag conflicts.
Core Web Vitals come next, because performance is both a ranking factor and a conversion factor. LCP, CLS, and INP issues usually trace back to unoptimised images, render-blocking scripts, or third-party embeds nobody has audited in years.
Structured data, internal linking architecture, and redirect chains round out the technical side. Only after those are fixed do we move into content strategy — there's little point writing new content for a site search engines can't crawl properly yet.