Where I start a technical SEO audit

A technical audit is not a list of every warning a tool can produce. It is a short answer to one question: is anything stopping the important pages from being found and understood?

1. Crawling and indexing

I compare the pages the business cares about with what Search Console reports as indexed. Gaps usually point to robots rules, noindex tags, weak internal links or duplicate versions of the same page.

2. Site structure

• Can every key page be reached in a few clicks?
• Do categories and URLs follow a clear logic?
• Are canonical tags pointing to the right version?

3. Speed and mobile

I check Core Web Vitals on real templates, not only the home page, because product and article templates are usually where the traffic lands.

The output is a prioritised list: what to fix first, why it matters, and who on the team should do it.

Turn a finding into an implementation task

For an important URL, inspect the response status, rendered content and URL Inspection report. Record the exact URL, the observed issue, the intended behaviour and the implementation owner. A robots.txt block prevents crawling; it does not reliably remove a URL from the index. Google must be able to crawl a page to see its noindex directive.

• Agree which pages should be indexable before changing directives.
• For an intended indexable page, verify a successful response, no blocking directive and the correct canonical.
• After release, recrawl the affected template and inspect representative URLs. Indexing is not guaranteed by passing these checks.
• Separate real-user Core Web Vitals data from lab diagnostics; use the latter to investigate, not to claim field improvement.