If your technical SEO is broken, even the best content won’t rank well. That means your hard work may not deliver the results you expect. To prevent this, it’s essential to run a technical SEO audit regularly and catch issues before they start affecting your traffic and visibility.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to run a technical SEO audit using free tools. We’ll walk you through a simple checklist covering HTTPS, page speed, crawlability, indexing, and more. By the end, you’ll know how to keep your website technically sound and search-friendly.
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit is a behind-the-scenes inspection of your website that evaluates how well it’s built for search engines. It checks whether your content can be easily crawled and indexed while ensuring your pages are fast, mobile-friendly, and secure for users.
The goal is to identify any technical issues that might limit your site’s visibility or performance in search results. By uncovering these issues, you can better understand how well your website meets search engine requirements and where it may need improvement.
A technical SEO audit can be done by anyone with a solid understanding of how websites and search engines work, and proficiency in using tools like Google Search Console. It’s typically handled by SEO specialists or marketers with technical expertise.
Why perform a technical SEO audit?
Short answer: A technical SEO audit helps improve your site’s visibility, performance, and overall search rankings.
Long answer: You should perform a technical SEO audit to ensure your website runs smoothly and search engines can easily access and understand it. Over time, issues like slow pages, broken links, or indexing errors can quietly harm your visibility and performance.
Here’s why it matters:
- Identify and fix crawl or indexing issues before they impact visibility.
- Improve page speed and user experience, which can directly influence rankings.
- Ensure your site performs well on mobile devices, supporting mobile-first indexing.
- Avoid ranking losses caused by broken links, redirect errors, or HTTPS issues.
A real-world example is Future.co, a fitness platform that saw its ranking keywords grow from 887 to 2,802, a 216% increase in just eight months after a technical SEO audit. Their organic traffic value also increased by 83%.
Technical SEO audit checklist
- Make sure your site uses HTTPS
- Evaluate your pages’ performance
- Verify your site is mobile-friendly
- Review your internal linking
- Audit your site’s crawlability and indexability
- Check for broken links and redirect issues
- Review your structured data implementation
- Evaluate your URL structure
- Review your site architecture
- Verify canonical tags
- Review hreflang implementation
- Check your robots.txt file
- Identify orphan pages
- Monitor for server errors
Each of these factors plays a critical role in your site’s overall technical health. Ignoring even one can affect your rankings, slow down your site, or hurt the user experience.
In the next sections, we’ll break down each checklist item and show you exactly how to perform your own technical SEO audit, from identifying issues to fixing them.
How to do a technical SEO audit
Now that you’ve reviewed the checklist, it’s time to put it into action. Below, we’ll walk through each step of a technical SEO audit and show you how to evaluate your site’s key elements using Google Search Console and other free tools.
Tools you’ll need: Google Search Console (free), Google Rich Results Test (free), and Ahrefs/Semrush/Screaming Frog/WebYes.
Step 1: Make sure your site uses HTTPS
What to do: Confirm that your entire website runs securely on HTTPS rather than HTTP.
Why: HTTPS ensures a secure connection and signals trustworthiness to both users and search engines. Also, Google uses it as a ranking factor.
How to do: Open Google Search Console and go to HTTPS under the “Experience” section. Check if any pages are listed as “Non-HTTPS URLs.” If you find any, note them for review and future correction. If all your pages are listed as HTTPS, great job.
Step 2: Evaluate your pages’ performance
What to do: Assess how quickly your pages load and how stable they are for users.
Why: Page experience is a ranking factor. Core Web Vitals (CWV) can affect SEO. Slow or unstable pages frustrate users, increase bounce rates, and can reduce visibility in search results.
How to do: Open Google Search Console and navigate to Core Web Vitals under the “Experience” section. Check the desktop report to see if any URLs are marked as “Poor” or “Need improvement.” Note these for later review. If all URLs are marked “Good,” nice work.
Step 3: Verify your site is mobile-friendly
What to do: Check how your website performs on mobile devices.
Why: Google uses mobile-first indexing, so your site’s mobile version determines rankings. Slow or unstable pages can hurt visibility and user experience.
How to do: Open Google Search Console and navigate to Core Web Vitals under the “Experience” section. Check the mobile report to see if any URLs are marked as “Poor” or “Needs improvement.” Note any issues for review. If all URLs are “Good,” your mobile experience is solid.
Step 4: Review your internal linking
What to do: Identify your most important pages and ensure they’re linked from other relevant pages, especially from high-traffic or top-level content.
Why: Internal links help search engines understand your site’s structure and pass ranking value. Well-connected key pages are easier to crawl and rank better.
How to do: In Google Search Console, go to Links → Internal links. Review the list of top internally linked pages and see which pages get the most links. Check if your key pages appear near the top; if not, they may need more internal links from relevant pages.
Step 5: Audit your site’s crawlability and indexability
What to do: Check if search engines can crawl and index your important pages.
Why: If Google can’t crawl or index your pages, they won’t appear in search results, meaning your efforts won’t translate into visibility or traffic, no matter how valuable the content is.
How to do: Open Google Search Console and navigate to Pages under the “Indexing” section. Review the “Why pages aren’t indexed” report to see which URLs Google couldn’t index.
Check whether any important pages, such as service, product, or key blog pages, appear in the list. Note the reason shown (for example, blocked by robots.txt, marked with noindex, or currently not indexed) so you can address it later.
Step 6: Check for broken links and redirect issues
What to do: Identify any broken links or faulty redirects that could negatively impact user navigation and search engine crawl paths.
Why: Broken links and redirect errors interrupt the user experience and make it harder for search engines to crawl your site efficiently.
How to do: Open Google Search Console and review the Pages report for any URLs marked as “Not found (404)” or “Redirect error.” Note these URLs for later correction, as they indicate broken or misdirected links that can disrupt both user experience and crawl efficiency.
Step 7: Review your structured data implementation
What to do: Check if your site uses structured data to help search engines understand your content and display enhanced search results.
Why: Structured data improves how your pages appear in search by showing elements like ratings or product details, which can boost visibility and click-through rates.
How to do: Go to Google’s Rich Results Test and enter your URL. Review the results to see which structured data types are detected, such as Articles, Products, or Breadcrumbs, and note any warnings or errors. Valid items mean your markup is working correctly.
Tip: If your key pages don’t have structured data, add it to help Google better understand your content and enhance how your pages appear in search results.
Step 8: Evaluate your URL structure
What to do: Review your site’s URLs to ensure they follow a clean and consistent format.
Why: A clear and descriptive URL structure helps both search engines and users understand what a page is about.
How to evaluate: Open Google Search Console and review your Pages report. Look for URLs that are too long, use query strings or uppercase letters, or don’t include clear keywords. Check if each URL accurately reflects the page’s topic and place in your site structure.
What to look for:
- The structure is logical and organised using clear subfolders.
- Hyphens are used as word separators (not underscores).
- URLs are short, lowercase, and consistent with trailing slash usage.
- URLs avoid dynamic parameters, session IDs, or unnecessary tracking strings.
- Keywords are relevant and descriptive of the page topic.
Step 9: Review your site architecture
What to do: Evaluate how your website’s pages are organised and connected.
Why: A clear, logical site architecture helps search engines crawl and index your pages efficiently while allowing users to find what they need with minimal clicks. Poor structure can lead to orphaned pages, crawl inefficiencies, and diluted page authority.
How to do: Use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Screaming Frog to visualise and analyse your site’s structure. Make sure important pages are reachable within three clicks from the homepage and that related content is grouped logically within clear subfolders.
Step 10: Verify canonical tags
What to do: Canonical URLs tell search engines which version of a page is preferred when similar or duplicate versions exist. Check whether each page’s declared canonical matches the URL Google selects as canonical, and note any pages where it differs.
Why: If the canonical tags are inconsistent, search engines may split ranking signals between similar pages or index the wrong one.
How to do: Open Google Search Console → Pages and review the statuses “Alternate page with proper canonical tag” and “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user.”
“Alternate page with proper canonical tag” means your canonical tag is working as intended. However, “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” means Google has overridden your canonical, which should be investigated.
If you have any URLs showing under “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user,” inspect them individually using the URL Inspection tool. Compare your declared canonical with the one Google has selected and note any mismatches for further review.
Step 11: Review hreflang implementation
What to do: hreflang tags tell search engines which language or regional version of a page to show users. Check whether your hreflang tags are correctly implemented to ensure the right audience sees the right version of your content.
Why: Incorrect or missing hreflang tags can cause Google to show the wrong page version to users, hurting user experience and local search visibility.
How to do: How to do: If your website targets multiple languages or regions, check hreflang tags using the hreflang Tags Testing Tool by Dentsu for individual pages. You can also run a site audit with WebYes to quickly spot incorrect or missing hreflang implementations.
Step 12: Check your robots.txt file
What to do: A robots.txt file tells search engines and other bots which parts of your site they can or can’t crawl. Make sure it doesn’t block key pages that should appear in search results or important bots that need access to your content.
Why: If your robots.txt blocks key pages, search engines won’t be able to crawl or index them, which can hurt visibility. It can also restrict AI crawlers like ChatGPT or Perplexity from accessing your content, limiting your reach in AI search results.
How to do: In Google Search Console, go to Settings → robots.txt to view your live file. Check if any important directories or pages are disallowed. Also, confirm that bots such as GPTBot or PerplexityBot aren’t unnecessarily blocked from crawling your site. The same process can also be done with a robots.txt checker outside of Google.
Step 13: Identify orphan pages
What to do: Find pages on your website that aren’t linked to from any other page.
Why: Pages without internal links will have low authority, making them unlikely to rank well, and search engines may eventually remove them from the index.
How to do: Run a site audit using tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Screaming Frog. These tools will flag pages that aren’t linked internally.
Step 14: Monitor for server errors
What to do: Check for server errors or HTTP status codes like 5xx (server issues) or 4xx (client errors) that prevent search engines and users from accessing your pages.
Why: Frequent server errors can block crawlers, hurt user experience, and cause key pages to drop out of search results.
How to do: Run a site audit using tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog, or WebYes to detect 4xx and 5xx errors. These tools will flag inaccessible URLs so you can review and address any recurring issues with your server or site configuration.
You can automate your technical SEO audit with WebYes
Manually checking every key page in Google Search Console can be time-consuming.
With WebYes, you can skip the manual work. Just select your key pages, run a scan, and it automatically flags technical SEO issues. All you have to do is review the results and take action on the issues that matter most.
It’s important to note that while WebYes doesn’t automate every check from this guide, it covers most of them and still saves you plenty of time compared to doing everything manually. Sign up for free to run your first audit and see how it works.
What to do after a technical SEO audit?
Completing a technical SEO audit is only the first step. What you do next determines how much impact it will have. Once you’ve identified issues and gathered insights, prioritise fixes based on their severity and potential effect on performance.
Start by addressing critical errors such as crawl or indexation problems, security issues (HTTPS), and broken links. Then move on to improvements that enhance user experience and rankings, like boosting page speed, refining internal links, or adding structured data.
Some fixes may need validation in Google Search Console before the updates appear. Keep monitoring your site’s performance and run another audit after a few weeks to confirm that all fixes have been applied and the issues resolved.
Wrapping up
A technical SEO audit is one of the best ways to keep your website healthy and maintain strong visibility over time. Following the steps in this guide helps ensure your site runs smoothly, stays optimised, and remains search-engine friendly.
However, remember that a technical SEO audit isn’t a one-time task.
Regular audits help you catch issues early, improve user experience, and protect your rankings from sudden drops. Make SEO audit a recurring part of your strategy, not just a one-time task, to keep your site fast, secure, and ready for growth.
FAQs
Use the WebYes free technical SEO audit tool to check your technical SEO score. It scans key areas like crawlability, indexability, speed, mobile-friendliness, and more, and then gives you a clear score and list of issues to fix. Just enter your URL and get instant results.
Technical SEO includes everything that helps search engines crawl, index, and understand your website. This includes site speed, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, crawlability, indexability, structured data, site structure, internal linking, and fixing broken links or redirects.
No, backlinks are not part of technical SEO. They fall under off-page SEO, which focuses on external signals like link building and authority. Technical SEO deals with site speed, structure, crawlability, and other backend elements that affect how search engines interact with your site.
A technical SEO audit should be performed every 3 to 6 months to ensure your site remains optimised. However, the ideal frequency depends on various factors. Check out our guide on how often you should audit your website for a detailed breakdown.
AUTHOR
Melwyn holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and has been writing professionally for over 4 years. He has a strong background in SEO and is certified in web accessibility from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). When he's not writing about website optimisation, you can find him enjoying a game of FIFA or exploring the open world of GTA.
Melwyn Joseph 
