The Quiet Killer of Your Search Rankings
Think about spending months making great content, only to find out that Google never indexed it. Or losing 53% of mobile visitors because your site takes 8 seconds to load. These hidden technical problems hurt your SEO work every day. A technical SEO audit is the tool you need to find and fix these important problems. On average, sites that do quarterly audits get 38% more organic traffic within six months.
What does a technical SEO audit look like? (And Why It’s Not Up for Discussion)
A technical SEO audit looks at your website’s infrastructure in a systematic way to find problems that stop search engines from crawling, indexing, or ranking your content. This is different from content optimization because it looks at backend health:
- Crawling: Are bots able to get to your pages?
- Indexing: Is the content saved in Google’s database?
- Performance: Does your site load right away?
- Are connections encrypted for security?
- If you don’t pay attention to these areas, even great content will stay hidden.
1: Fixing Errors in Indexing
If there are indexing errors, Google won’t be able to save or show your pages. Here’s how to find and fix them:
Step 1: Check for crawlability
- Use Google Search Console (GSC) to find crawl blocks:
- Go to the Coverage Report to see which pages are “Excluded” or “Error.”
- Check robots.txt to make sure you’re not blocking important pages by mistake.
- Important Fix: Send a clean XML sitemap to GSC to help bots find their way.
Step 2: Problems with indexing
- Web pages that say “Discovered – currently not indexed” in GSC have the following problems:
- Thin content: Add more than 500 words of original text
- Duplicate content: Use canonical tags to link to the original pages.
- Pages that don’t have any links to them: Add 2 to 3 links from pages with a lot of authority.
🔍 Pro Tip: After making changes, use GSC’s URL Inspection Tool to force-index important pages.
Step 3: Errors with HTTP Status Codes
- 404 Not Found: Make 301 redirects to the right pages
- 500 Server Errors: Get in touch with your hosting company
- 302 Temporary Redirects: Changing to 301 (permanent) passes link equity
2: Speed up the site
Google puts speed first. When pages take a long time to load, the bounce rate goes up by 123%:
Step 1: Find out what the Core Web Vitals are
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check:
- LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint, should be less than 2.5 seconds.
- First Input Delay (FID): Less than 100 milliseconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) should be less than 0.1
Step 2: Fixes for Critical Speed
- Compress Images: Change them to WebP format, which is 70% smaller than JPEG.
- Minify Code: Take out comments and spaces from HTML, CSS, and JS
- Enable Caching: For static resources, set the cache to expire after one year.
- Use a CDN to serve content from servers in your area (like Cloudflare).
Step 3: Make sure your site works well on mobile devices first
- Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if your site works on mobile devices.
- Make sure that tap targets (buttons) are bigger than 48px.
- Get rid of annoying pop-ups that block content.
3: Advanced Technical Health Security Basics
- Moving to HTTPS: Sites that don’t use HTTPS rank lower. Put in an SSL certificate.
- Fixes for mixed content: Make sure that all resources load over HTTPS
Using structured data
Add schema markup to make rich snippets:
json <script type=”application/ld+json”>
{ “@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “Article”, “headline”: “Technical SEO Audit Guide”, “description”: “Step-by-step instructions to fix indexing and speed issues”, “author”: { “@type”: “Person”, “name”: “Your Name” } }
Checks for International SEO
- For sites that support more than one language, use hreflang tags.
- Set geographic goals in GSC for domains that are specific to a country
A 10-Point Technical SEO Audit Checklist
- Google Search Console: Fix all the mistakes in the Coverage Report
- XML Sitemap: Send GSC the most recent version
- Redirect Audit: Change broken 404s into 301 redirects
- Core Web Vitals: Improve LCP, FID, and CLS
- Mobile UX: Check that the design is responsive and that the tap targets are correct.
- HTTPS: Make sure SSL is fully set up
- Structured Data: Use Schema.org to check your markup
- Internal Links: Use 2–3 internal links to fix orphan pages
- Duplicate Content: Add canonical tags to copies
- Hreflang Tags: Use them on sites that are global
Free Tools for Self-Assessment
- Google Search Console: diagnostics for crawling and indexing
- PageSpeed Insights: Speed and Core Web Vitals
- Screaming Frog: You can crawl up to 500 URLs for free.
- Schema Markup Validator: Check structured data
- Redirect Checker: Check the audit chain for redirects
Don’t Make These Important Audit Mistakes
- ❌ Not paying attention to GSC warnings: GSC can fix 90% of indexing mistakes.
- ❌ One-time audits: Technical SEO gets worse; audits every three months
- ❌ Checking only the desktop: Problems with mobile hurt rankings more
- ❌ Not paying attention to JavaScript: Make sure bots can read JS/CSS
Real Change: Before and After
A SaaS company fixed 120 indexing mistakes and made LCP go from 4.2 seconds to 1.8 seconds. Results after 90 days:
- Traffic from search engines: +64%
- Keyword rankings: 42 keywords made it to the top 3 spots.
- Rate of conversion: +29%
Important Points
- Fix indexing errors first with GSC Coverage Reports so that your content isn’t hidden.
- Site speed has a direct effect on rankings—make it a priority Main Web Vitals
- Google uses mobile-first indexing, so mobile optimization is a must.
- Install SSL certificates right away because HTTPS security builds trust.
- Structured data makes things easier to find. Use schema to make rich snippets.
“A technical SEO audit isn’t about making everything perfect; it’s about getting rid of things that get in the way of your content and your audience.”
Today, pick one thing from the list to do. Your rankings and visitors will be grateful.
