A Technical SEO Audit Checklist You Can Actually Use Today

Technical SEO is the plumbing underneath everything else: it decides whether search engines can find your pages, understand what is on them, and trust them enough to show them. You can write the best content on the internet and still not rank, if a stray line in a config file is quietly telling Google not to look at it. This checklist walks through the technical issues that most commonly hold small business sites back, roughly in the order we check them ourselves.

1. Crawling and indexing

• Does robots.txt exist, and does it avoid accidentally blocking pages you actually want found? A single misplaced line here can deindex an entire site.
• Is there an XML sitemap listing your real, current pages, and is it actually submitted in Google Search Console?
• Are the pages that matter indexable — no stray `noindex` tag left over from a staging site, no accidental password-protection?
• Do canonical tags point to the one true version of each page, especially if the same content is ever reachable at more than one URL (with and without `www`, with and without a trailing slash)?

2. Site structure

• Is the URL structure short, readable and logical (`/services/seo`, not `/index.php?id=4827`)?
• Can a visitor — and a search engine — reach any important page within a few clicks of the homepage? Pages buried eight levels deep get crawled less often and rank worse.
• Are there broken internal links, or long chains of redirects (a link that 301s to a page that 301s again)? Each hop in a chain adds delay and dilutes the value passed along.

3. Page basics

• Does every page have a unique title and meta description? Duplicate or missing ones across many pages is one of the most common issues we find on small sites.
• Exactly one H1 per page, with H2s and H3s that follow a logical order underneath it — not headings chosen for font size.
• Do images have real, descriptive alt text, and are they a sensible file size rather than an untouched 6MB photo straight from a camera?

4. Speed and mobile

• Check your Core Web Vitals — Google's own free PageSpeed Insights tool will show you exactly where a page is slow.
• Does the site actually work well on a phone: text readable without zooming, buttons large enough to tap accurately, no horizontal scrolling?
• Is the whole site served over HTTPS, with no mixed-content warnings from old HTTP images or scripts?

5. Structured data

Structured data (schema markup) is a standard, machine-readable way of telling search engines exactly what a page is — a business, a service, a review, a set of questions and answers — rather than leaving them to infer it from ordinary text. It will not fix a technical problem by itself, but it makes the difference between a search engine guessing what your business does and knowing. See our guide to schema markup for what to add and why.

6. A few things worth checking manually

• Search `site:yourdomain.com` in Google to see roughly what is actually indexed, and whether anything unexpected (an old staging URL, a duplicate page) shows up.
• Open your site in an incognito window and click through as a first-time visitor would — broken links and layout problems are easy to miss once you are used to your own site.
• Check Google Search Console's Coverage report for pages Google tried to crawl and could not, and why.

Free tools for the basics

Our free tools cover several of these directly: a robots.txt generator, a sitemap builder, and a page structure checker that reads a page's title, description, headings and image alt text and tells you what is missing. They run entirely in your browser — nothing you check is uploaded anywhere.

How often to actually re-check

Run this full list after any significant change — a redesign, a platform migration, a new developer taking over the site — and give it a lighter pass every few months even when nothing obvious has changed. Technical SEO issues are quiet by nature: a plugin update that adds a stray `noindex` tag, or a redirect that starts looping, will not announce itself. The businesses that catch these fastest are the ones who check on a schedule, not just when traffic has already visibly dropped.

Where Cloud9 fits

A checklist catches the common issues. A full technical audit goes further: crawling every page the way a search engine does, checking log files for how bots actually behave on your site, and prioritising fixes by how much they are likely to move the needle rather than fixing everything in the order it was found. If you want that depth, start with a free SEO analysis or see our SEO service.