How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit: Find and Fix Issues That Affect Website Rankings

Short answer: How to perform a technical SEO audit comes down to one process. Run a crawl of your site, then compare the results with Google Search Console’s indexing, page experience, and crawl reports. Fix problems in this order: pages blocked from crawling, pages missing from the index, broken links and redirect chains, duplicate URLs, slow or unstable pages, mobile faults, and missing structured data. Check again after each fix and repeat the audit every quarter.

What Are Technical SEO Issues?

Technical SEO issues are faults in how your website is built or served that prevent search engines from finding, reading, or trusting your pages. Your content can be excellent yet still rank poorly if Googlebot cannot reach it, if the page loads too slowly, or if five different URLs show the same text. Many of these faults lie in website crawling and indexing, so that is the first place to look.

The common technical SEO issues fall into four groups:

• Crawling: Can search engine bots reach the page?
• Indexing: Is the page stored and eligible to appear in results?
• Page experience: Is the page fast, stable, secure, and easy to use on a phone?
• Understanding: Do headings, links, and structured data make the topic clear?

How Technical Issues Affect Rankings

Search engines have limited time to spend on each website. If website SEO errors affect a large share of your URLs, such as error pages, redirects, and duplicates, bots waste that time and may visit your important pages less often.

The effects show up in different ways:

• A page blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag cannot rank.
• Slow pages lose visitors before they read anything, which weakens the signals that indicate a page is useful.
• Duplicate URLs split links and clicks across several versions of one page.
• Missing or broken schema reduces the chance of richer results.
• Mobile faults affect most visitors because Google indexes the mobile version of a page first.

For a business, the cost is direct. A product page that is not indexed cannot generate orders, and a service page that loads in six seconds loses leads to a faster competitor. That is why knowing how to perform a technical SEO audit matters before any content or link work begins.

How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit: Tools You Need

A technical SEO audit does not need an expensive stack. Two free tools cover most of the work.

Use a crawler to see the site the way a bot does, and use Search Console to see how Google itself treats it, including Google Search Console indexing issues such as excluded or unindexed pages. When the two disagree, trust Search Console. This pairing forms the basis for performing a technical SEO audit on any site.

How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit Step by Step

Step 1: Check Crawlability

How to find it: Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read every Disallow line. Then run the URL Inspection tool in Search Console on your key pages and check whether crawling is allowed.

Common faults: A leftover Disallow: / from a staging site, blocked CSS or JavaScript files, and orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them.

How to fix it: Remove blocks that cover pages you want to rank. Keep disallow rules only for cart, login, internal search, and similar pages. Link every important page from at least one other page, and include it in your XML sitemap.

Step 2: Check Indexing and Fix Google Search Console Indexing Issues

How to find it: In Search Console, open the Pages report under Indexing. Review the reasons for pages that are not indexed, such as “Crawled – currently not indexed,” “Discovered – currently not indexed,” “Excluded by noindex tag,” and “Duplicate without user-selected canonical.”

How to fix it:

• Remove accidental noindex tags from pages that should rank.
• Improve thin pages that Google crawled but did not store, or merge them into stronger pages.
• Add internal links to pages that Google found but has not crawled yet.
• Keep your XML sitemap clean. List only live pages that return a 200 status code and have a self-referencing canonical.

Step 3: Fix Status Codes, Redirects and Website SEO Errors

How to find it: Crawl the site and filter by response code. Look for 404 errors, 5xx server errors, 302 redirects that should be permanent, and redirect chains where one URL jumps through two or more hops.

How to fix it:

• Redirect removed pages with a 301 to the closest matching page, not to the home page.
• Update internal links so they point directly to the final URL.
• Shorten redirect chains to a single hop.
• Fix server errors with your developer or host, because repeated 5xx errors can reduce how often Google crawls.
• Leave a true 404 or 410 status code in place for pages that have no replacement.

Step 4: Remove Duplicate Content and Set Canonicals

How to find it: Search your crawl results for repeated titles, repeated H1 tags and identical content. Check that these four versions of the home page lead to one address: http://, https://, www, and non-www. Also look for URLs created by filters, sorting, tracking parameters, and trailing slashes.

How to fix it:

• Choose one preferred version of each page and add a self-referencing canonical tag to that version.
• Point duplicate or parameterized URLs to the preferred version using a canonical tag or a 301 redirect.
• Redirect all non-preferred protocol and host versions to a single secure address.
• Rewrite near-duplicate product or location pages so each has its own details.

Step 5: Improve Page Speed and Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals measure the real visitor experience. Google’s published targets for a “good” result are:

How to find it: Open the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console to identify groups of slow URLs, then test a sample page from each group in PageSpeed Insights.

How to fix it:

• Compress images and serve them in WebP or AVIF.
• Set width and height for images and ad slots to prevent layout shifts.
• Load the main hero image first, then delay loading images further down the page.
• Remove unused JavaScript and third-party scripts, including outdated chat widgets and tracking tags.
• Use a caching plugin or server-side caching, and add a content delivery network if your visitors are spread across regions.

• Choose hosting that responds quickly, since a slow server limits every other fix.

Step 6: Fix Mobile Faults

How to find it: Open your site on a real phone, then use the URL Inspection tool to view the mobile-rendered page. Look for text that is too small, buttons that are too close together, content that is wider than the screen, and content that exists only on desktop.

How to fix it:

• Use a responsive layout with the correct viewport meta tag.
• Keep the same text, links, and structured data on mobile and desktop.
• Make tap targets large enough to press without zooming.
• Avoid pop-ups that cover the main content on small screens.

Step 7: Secure the Site with HTTPS

How to find it: Check that every page loads over HTTPS and that the browser shows no warnings. Crawl for mixed content, where a secure page loads an image or script over HTTP.

How to fix it: Install a valid SSL certificate, renew it before it expires, redirect all HTTP URLs to HTTPS, and update internal links, canonicals, and sitemap entries to the secure version.

Step 8: Check Site Structure and Internal Links

How to find it: In your crawl, review click depth. Important pages should be within three clicks of the home page. Identify orphan pages, pages with very few internal links, and links that use vague anchor text such as “click here.”

How to fix it:

• Group related pages into clear topic clusters, with a main page linking to supporting articles and each article linking back to the main page.
• Use short, descriptive anchor text that tells the reader what the next page covers.
• Add breadcrumb links so both visitors and bots understand where a page is located.
• Keep URLs short, readable, and free of unnecessary parameters.

Step 9: Add and Validate Structured Data

How to find it: Test key pages using the Google Rich Results Test, then review the Enhancements section in Search Console.

How to fix it:

• Use JSON-LD for Organization, Article or BlogPosting, BreadcrumbList, Product, LocalBusiness, and FAQPage where they fit the page.
• Ensure every value in the markup matches the text visitors can see.
• Do not mark up ratings, reviews, or prices that do not appear on the page.
• Retest after each change and fix errors before warnings.

Note that Google shows FAQ rich results for only a limited set of sites, so add FAQ markup to clarify the page, not because you expect a rich result.

Step 10: Check Titles, Headings and Hreflang

How to find it: Crawl for missing, duplicate, and overly long title tags and meta descriptions, pages with no H1 or multiple H1 tags, and incorrect hreflang values on sites with more than one language or country version.

How to fix it: Write one clear title and one H1 per page that match the search topic. Keep titles near 60 characters. Provide a return hreflang tag for every language version that points back to the others.

How to Improve Website Technical SEO: Issues and Fixes at a Glance

Fix high-priority items first, because they decide whether a page can rank at all.

How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit for Local and Regional Businesses

If you serve customers in a particular city or state, a few extra checks matter.

• Mobile speed on slower connections. Many visitors in India browse on mobile data, so test pages on a throttled 4G setting and keep the page weight low.
• Consistent business details. The name, address, and phone number on your site should match your Google Business Profile exactly.
• LocalBusiness schema. Add address, opening hours, service area, and contact details in structured data.
• Separate location pages. Give each city or branch its own page with unique content. Copying one page and swapping the city name creates duplicates.
• Language and region signals. Use hreflang if you publish in English and Hindi or serve more than one country.

Technical SEO for AI Search (GEO)

AI search tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity rely on content that is easy to access, read, and trust. They depend on website crawling and indexing, just like normal search. Google states that its AI features follow the same basic requirements as normal search, so there is no special file or markup you need to add. The technical work stays the same:

• Allow the search and AI crawlers you want to be cited by in robots.txt, and do not block them by accident.
• Put key answers in visible HTML text, not in images or scripts that require heavy rendering.
• Start each section with a short, direct answer, then add detail.
• Use tables, lists, and clear headings so a system can extract an accurate summary.
• Name an author, show a publication and update date, and link to primary sources.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Blocking the whole site during a redesign and forgetting to remove the block at launch.
• Changing URLs without adding 301 redirects.
• Fixing speed scores on one page and ignoring the rest of the template.
• Adding every available schema type, including ones that do not match the page.
• Treating a one-time audit as permanent. New plugins, content, and updates bring new faults.
• Chasing a perfect 100 score when real visitor data already shows a “good” result.

How Often Should You Run a Technical SEO Audit?

Run a full audit every three months for an active business website, and every month for large online stores or sites that publish daily. Run a quick check after every redesign, migration, plugin change or hosting move. Follow the same steps on how to perform a technical SEO audit each time, so results stay easy to compare. Set Search Console email alerts so that a sudden rise in errors reaches you within days, not months.

When you report to a business owner or an investor, track a small set of metrics that show progress: indexed pages versus submitted pages, share of URLs with good Core Web Vitals, crawl error count, and organic clicks and impressions over time. These figures show whether technical work is translating into visibility.

When to Bring in a Technical SEO Specialist

You can handle titles, redirects, and basic speed fixes yourself. For many small sites, improving technical SEO starts with those three tasks. Bring in a specialist when you plan a site migration, run a store with thousands of product URLs, see a sudden drop in indexed pages, or need server log analysis. A specialist usually delivers a prioritized issue list, clear instructions for your developer, and a plan to check results after release. Knowing how to perform a technical SEO audit also lets you evaluate that work and confirm that each fix appears in your reports.

Build Your Web Development Skills With Digittrix Academy

Technical SEO works best when the people who build a website also understand how search engines crawl it. If you want a career in web development, Digittrix Academy offers MERN stack training covering MongoDB, Express.js, React, and Node.js, so you can build fast, crawlable, and well-structured web applications.

To ask about courses and admissions, email tanvi@digittrix.com or visit Digittrix Academy.