A technical SEO audit examines your website’s infrastructure to find problems stopping Google from ranking your pages properly
The process takes 1-2 weeks and combines automated crawling with manual expert analysis
You should receive a prioritised report with plain English explanations and specific fix recommendations for each issue
Audits check crawlability, site speed, Core Web Vitals, mobile performance, broken links, and internal linking
After receiving your report, you can implement fixes yourself, use your developer, or hire the auditor separately
around 94% of websites have technical issues affecting their visibility
SE Ranking 2025 study
A technical SEO audit is a detailed examination of your website’s infrastructure that identifies problems preventing search engines from properly finding and ranking your pages.
You’ve been told you need one, but what does that actually mean?
- What will they check?
- How long does it take?
- And what will you actually get at the end of it?
These are sensible questions.
Technical SEO sounds complicated when agencies start talking about crawlability, indexation, and Core Web Vitals.
Without knowing what an audit involves, it’s difficult to tell whether you’re getting genuine value or just paying for an automated report.
According to SE Ranking’s 2025 analysis, 50% of websites have duplicate meta descriptions and 54% have duplicate title tags, issues that automated tools flag but can’t prioritise or contextualise.
This guide walks you through what happens during a technical SEO audit, explains the process step by step, and shows you what deliverables to expect. You’ll finish knowing exactly what questions to ask before booking and what a professional audit should include.
Table of Contents
What Is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit examines your website’s infrastructure and technical setup. It finds problems that might be stopping search engines like Google from properly finding, understanding, and ranking your pages.
Think of it as an MOT for your website.
Just as an MOT checks whether your car meets road safety standards, a technical audit checks whether your site meets the requirements search engines need. With only 33% of websites currently meeting Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds according to 2024 data, most sites have room for improvement.
You might have excellent content, but if Google can’t access it properly, that content won’t rank.
A technical audit differs from a content audit.
Content audits look at what you’ve written and whether it targets the right keywords. Technical audits focus on the underlying structure and code affecting how search engines interact with your site. Many businesses need both, but they solve different problems.
What Does a Technical SEO Audit Check?
A thorough audit examines several areas of your website. Here’s what an auditor will look at.
How Does Google Access Your Website?
The first thing any audit checks is whether Google can actually find and index your pages. This involves reviewing your robots.txt file (which tells search engines which parts of your site they can access) and your XML sitemap (the file listing all pages you want Google to index).
Auditors look for pages accidentally blocked from indexing, incorrect canonical tags pointing Google to the wrong page version, and indexing errors appearing in Google Search Console.
These problems are often invisible when you browse your own site, but they directly affect whether your pages appear in search results.
For example, a single misplaced line in your robots.txt file could block Google from seeing your entire blog section. You’d never notice because the pages load fine for you, but Google would have no idea they exist.
XML Sitemaps: What They Are and How They Help SEO
How Fast Does Your Website Load?
Page speed affects both rankings and user experience. An audit tests your website using tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to measure load times and identify what’s slowing things down.
You’ll likely see references to Core Web Vitals in your audit report. These are specific measurements Google uses as ranking factors:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measures how quickly your main content loads. Google’s threshold is 2.5 seconds or less.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint) measures how fast your site responds when someone clicks a button or link. Google’s target is under 200 milliseconds.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measures whether page elements jump around while loading. Google recommends a score of 0.1 or less.
Lower scores are better.
The audit also checks mobile performance.
Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily looks at the mobile version of your site when deciding rankings. With mobile devices accounting for over 60% of global website traffic according to Statista, this is important to get right.
An auditor tests responsive design, tap target sizes, and how your site performs on actual mobile devices.
What Technical Problems Exist on Your Site?
Audits identify specific issues needing attention.
Research shows these problems are widespread: 50% of websites have duplicate meta descriptions, 54% have duplicate title tags, and only 26% of websites use alt text for their images (SE Ranking, 2025).
Common problems include:
- Broken internal links leading to error pages
- Redirect chains slowing down page loading (when page A redirects to B, which redirects to C, which finally loads the content)
- Duplicate content appearing on multiple URLs, confusing Google about which version to rank
- Missing or duplicate page titles and meta descriptions
- Heading structures that don’t follow a logical order
- Images missing alt text, making them invisible to search engines
The audit also examines your internal linking structure. If your most important pages don’t receive many links from other pages on your site, Google may not recognise their importance.
What Are the 10 Main Things a Technical SEO Audit Checks?
Every technical SEO audit covers slightly different ground, but most professional audits examine these ten areas:
- Crawlability – Can Google’s bots access all your important pages? Auditors check your robots.txt file, crawl errors, and whether anything is accidentally blocking search engines.
- Indexing status – Are your pages actually appearing in Google’s index? This includes checking for noindex tags, canonical issues, and pages Google has chosen not to include.
- Site speed – How quickly do your pages load? Auditors test loading times on desktop and mobile using tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix.
- Core Web Vitals – Does your site meet Google’s performance thresholds for LCP, INP, and CLS? These metrics directly affect rankings.
- Mobile friendliness – Does your site work properly on phones and tablets? With Google using mobile-first indexing, this affects how your entire site ranks.
- URL structure – Are your URLs clean, logical, and consistent? Auditors look for overly long URLs, missing HTTPS, and confusing URL patterns.
- Internal linking – Do your pages link to each other sensibly? Poor internal linking means important pages don’t receive enough authority from your other content.
- Broken links and redirects – Are there dead links or redirect chains slowing things down? Both waste crawl budget and frustrate users.
- Duplicate content – Is the same content appearing on multiple URLs? This confuses Google about which version to rank.
- On-page elements – Are page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and image alt text properly configured? Missing or duplicate elements are common problems.
Not every audit weights these items equally. Some go deeper on speed optimisation while others focus more on indexing issues. Ask what your audit will prioritise based on your website’s specific situation.
What Is the Typical Audit Process?
Understanding the process helps you know what to expect and when.
How Does Data Collection Work?
The audit starts with gathering data about your website.
Auditors use professional crawling tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or Semrush to scan your entire site. These tools visit every page, check every link, and collect data on technical elements like page titles, meta descriptions, and response codes.
This crawl provides raw data, but it isn’t the audit itself.
The crawl identifies potential issues, but a good auditor then manually reviews this data to understand which problems actually matter and which are false positives.
For instance, an automated scan might flag hundreds of pages as having “thin content” when they’re actually product pages that deliberately have minimal text. A skilled auditor recognises this and focuses on genuine problems instead.
Auditors will also want to connect to Google Search Console to see how Google specifically views your site. This reveals indexing errors, crawl problems, and pages Google considers duplicates.
What Happens After the Crawl?
Once data collection finishes, the analysis phase begins. The auditor reviews every category of issue, assesses severity, and determines which fixes will have the biggest impact on your rankings.
This is where experience really matters.
Anyone can run an automated scan, but understanding what the results mean requires expertise. An SEO professional knows which issues need urgent attention, which can wait, and which are simply how your site is supposed to work.
The auditor then creates your report, organising findings into categories and prioritising recommendations based on impact and difficulty. Report creation typically takes several days for a thorough audit.
These tools primarily focus on the data and often pretty colours arranged in green, yellow, and red to indicate your website is about to explode. What they don’t provide are insights. What does the data mean? Which issues should be prioritised? How do you actually improve? You can’t answer these questions without having an experienced SEO draw out the necessary insights and apply them to the website’s strategy.
Portent Blog – “Manual vs. Automatic SEO Audits”
https://portent.com/blog/seo/manual-vs-automatic-seo-audits.htm
What Deliverables Should You Receive?
The deliverables are what you actually get at the end.
Here’s what a professional audit should include.
A written report explaining every issue found. This should use plain English, not technical jargon. When technical terms appear, they should be explained. Good reports include screenshots highlighting specific problems so you can see exactly what the auditor means.
Prioritised recommendations. The report should clearly state what to fix first (because it’s causing the biggest problems), what to address next (when time permits), and what to monitor (not urgent but worth watching). Each issue needs specific recommendations showing exactly how to resolve it.
An action plan with clear next steps. This helps you understand what to do with the information, whether you’re implementing changes yourself, handing the report to your developer, or asking the auditor to quote for implementation work.
What separates good audits from poor ones? Cheap audits often just deliver automated scan results with no analysis. You get a list of 500 “issues” with no indication of which actually matter.
I’ve been sent hundreds of audits over the years. I got fed up with seeing low quality, 99% automated audits that offer extremely little value. It seemed like every SEO audit was the same: put a website in an SEO tool, let that spit out basic recommendations, put a logo on it.
SEO Audits IO
Professional audits filter the noise, explain the business impact of each problem, and give you a clear path forward.
What Questions Should You Ask Before Booking?
Before commissioning an audit, ask potential providers these questions to ensure you’ll get what you need.
Timeline and delivery: How long will the audit take? When will you receive the report?
Most professional audits take 1-2 weeks, though this varies based on website size. Be wary of anyone promising a thorough audit in 24 hours.
Deliverables: Will you receive a written report? Will issues be prioritised? Will specific recommendations be included?
Some cheaper services only provide automated scan results without analysis or recommendations.
Implementation support: Does the audit include any fixes, or is it report-only? If you need help implementing changes, is that available separately? What does implementation typically cost?
Tools and methodology: Professional audits use multiple paid tools combined with manual analysis. If someone claims to audit your site using only free tools, they’ll miss important problems that paid tools catch.
What Happens After You Receive Your Audit?
Once you have your report, you have several options. The report is yours to use however you choose.
If you have technical skills or a web developer on your team, you can implement the recommended changes yourself. The prioritised recommendations tell you which fixes to tackle first for maximum impact.
You can give the report to your existing web developer or IT team. A good audit report provides enough detail for any competent developer to understand and implement the changes.
You can also hire the auditor or another SEO specialist to handle implementation. This is typically quoted separately based on which fixes you want completed and their complexity.
Many businesses take a mixed approach, handling straightforward changes themselves and hiring specialists for more technical fixes. There’s no wrong answer. The audit gives you the information to make that decision.
When Should You Get Your Website Audited?
Regular audits catch problems before they become serious. Google updates its algorithm constantly, and technical requirements evolve.
Here’s when audits make most sense:
- New websites should be audited before launch to fix problems during development
- Established websites benefit from annual audits to stay aligned with current standards
- After major changes like platform migrations, redesigns, or significant content additions
- When traffic drops unexpectedly, to identify whether technical issues are the cause
An audit is an investment in your website’s foundation. With 53% of users abandoning a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load (Google), the problems an audit identifies might be costing you customers every day they remain unfixed.
Frequently Asked Questions
A professional technical SEO audit typically takes 1-2 weeks from start to finish. The exact timeframe depends on your website’s size and complexity. Small business websites with 20-50 pages will be completed faster than large sites with hundreds of pages. The process involves running crawling software, manually analysing the data, identifying genuine issues, creating recommendations, and compiling everything into a clear report.
Related: How Long Does SEO Take to Work?
Technical SEO audits in the UK typically cost between £400 and £1,500 for small business websites. The price depends on website size, complexity, and analysis depth required. Larger sites with hundreds of pages or multiple subdomains cost more because they take longer to audit thoroughly. Be cautious of very cheap audits, as these are often thin automated reports without professional analysis or actionable recommendations.
Possibly, yes. We like to request hosting access to check server configuration, review .htaccess files, or examine caching settings that affect site speed. This is more common with thorough audits that look beyond what crawling tools can see. If you’re uncomfortable granting full hosting access, ask whether read-only access or specific screenshots would work instead. Many hosting providers let you create limited user accounts with restricted permissions. Always check what level of access is being requested and why before sharing any login details.
A technical SEO audit examines your website’s infrastructure, checking whether search engines can crawl and index your pages properly. It focuses on site speed, mobile performance, broken links, and XML sitemaps. A content audit analyses your actual page content, assessing quality, keyword targeting, and content gaps. Technical audits ensure Google can access your site; content audits ensure what Google finds is valuable. Many businesses benefit from both types.
You can run free tools like Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to identify some surface-level issues. However, professional audits use multiple paid tools combined with manual analysis from experienced specialists who understand what different errors mean. Free tools might flag 404 errors but won’t explain which ones matter or how they affect your crawl budget. Most small business owners find hiring a specialist provides better value than attempting a thorough audit themselves.
Professional auditors typically use a combination of tools: Screaming Frog for crawling websites, Ahrefs or Semrush for backlink and competitive analysis, Google Search Console for indexing insights, PageSpeed Insights for speed testing, and GTmetrix for detailed performance analysis. Using multiple tools together catches more problems than any single tool alone. The skill lies in interpreting what these tools report and turning data into actionable recommendations.
An audit identifies problems and provides recommendations, but it doesn’t include implementing fixes. Think of it like a doctor’s diagnosis. The audit tells you what’s wrong and what treatment is needed, but you then decide how to proceed. You can implement fixes yourself, use your developer, or hire the auditor separately for implementation work. Most auditors offer implementation services at additional cost.
Sometimes developers and SEO specialists have different perspectives on recommendations. A good audit report explains why each recommendation matters for search performance, helping developers understand the reasoning. If disagreements arise, ask both parties to explain their position. Some recommendations may have alternative solutions that achieve the same SEO outcome differently. Open communication usually resolves these situations.
Professional auditors typically need access to Google Search Console to see how Google views your website. Google Analytics access helps them understand traffic patterns and identify pages losing performance. Some auditors also request access to your content management system (WordPress) to check settings and configurations. Legitimate auditors will explain what access they need and why. Never share login credentials directly; use the proper sharing features in each tool.
Start with the high-priority issues marked as most urgent. These typically include problems blocking Google from accessing your content, serious speed issues, or broken pages returning error codes. Fixing these first delivers the biggest impact. Create a schedule for addressing medium-priority items over the following weeks. Low-priority issues can wait but shouldn’t be forgotten. Many businesses create a simple spreadsheet to track what’s been fixed.
Related: How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
Fixing technical issues removes barriers that might be holding your rankings back, but it doesn’t guarantee specific positions. Technical SEO ensures Google can find and understand your content properly. Your actual rankings also depend on content quality, backlinks, competition, and many other factors. Think of technical fixes as necessary foundations. They may not immediately boost rankings, but ignoring technical problems will definitely hurt them over time.