How I Run a Technical SEO Audit (My Actual Process)

I've run technical SEO audits on sites ranging from five-page brochures to e-commerce catalogues with 50,000 SKUs. The order matters. Fixing meta descriptions on pages Google can't crawl does nothing.

Step 1: Crawl the Site First

Open Screaming Frog and crawl the full site. For sites under 500 URLs, the free plan covers it. For larger sites, the paid licence at £199/year is worth it. Export everything. You're looking for: 4xx errors, redirect chains (A → B → C instead of A → C), pages blocked by robots.txt that shouldn't be, and duplicate page titles.

Fix your 4xx errors immediately — these are broken pages. Redirect chains add latency and dilute PageRank; collapse them to single hops.

Step 2: Check Indexability

Open Google Search Console and go to Pages → Not Indexed. "Crawled but not indexed" means Google found the page but decided not to index it — usually thin content or near-duplicate pages. "Discovered but not indexed" means Google hasn't crawled it yet — usually a crawl budget or internal linking problem.

Step 3: Canonical Tags

Every page should either be canonical to itself or point to the definitive version. Check for self-referencing canonicals on paginated pages (wrong) and make sure faceted navigation pages in e-commerce aren't indexing thousands of near-duplicate filter combinations.

Step 4: Structured Data

Run key page types through Google's Rich Results Test. Structured data doesn't directly boost rankings, but rich snippets improve CTR — which matters in the real world.

Step 5: Core Web Vitals

Run your top five landing pages through PageSpeed Insights. Fix LCP first — it has the strongest correlation with ranking changes.