Technical SEO audit that finds what's silently capping your rankings.
Crawl errors, failed Core Web Vitals, and blocked pages suppress rankings without ever showing up as an obvious problem. We find them, rank them by business impact, and tell you exactly what to fix first.
What is a technical SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit finds the structural problems on a website that prevent Google from crawling, indexing, and ranking its pages: broken redirects, slow Core Web Vitals scores, blocked pages, missing structured data, and site architecture issues. It's the infrastructure layer underneath everything else in search. Brilliant content, strong backlinks, and perfect keyword targeting all underperform when the technical foundation underneath them is broken.
The scale of the problem is bigger than most businesses assume. 72% of websites fail at least one critical technical SEO factor — and these aren't edge cases on poorly maintained sites, they're the statistical norm across the web. 95.2% of sites have some form of redirect issue, 59.5% are missing H1 tags, and 80.4% are missing image alt attributes. Meanwhile, 96.55% of all pages on the internet get zero organic search traffic from Google, largely because the pages were never properly crawled or indexed in the first place.
The gap that matters: Google can only rank pages it has found, crawled, and indexed. Every hour spent on content or link building for a page Google can't even access is wasted. Crawlability and indexation issues get fixed first in every audit we run, because everything else builds on that foundation.
- Lab + field data
- Lighthouse and CrUX together, since either alone misses issues.
- Ranked by impact
- 10–30 findings ordered by business impact, not tool default.
- AI crawlers checked
- PerplexityBot and ChatGPT-User access verified, not assumed.
- Verified after fixing
- Re-crawled to confirm each issue is actually resolved.
The Core Web Vitals thresholds, and what each one measures.
Core Web Vitals are Google's page experience metrics, and a confirmed ranking factor. Only 33% of websites currently pass all three.
| Metric | What it measures | 2026 threshold |
|---|---|---|
| LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) | Time for the largest visible element to load. | Under 2.5s |
| INP (Interaction to Next Paint) | Page responsiveness on interaction; replaced FID in 2024. | Under 200ms |
| CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) | Visual stability as the page loads. | Under 0.1 |
Two things most audits get wrong.
Lab scores that lie, and a crawler check that stops at Googlebot.
Why lab scores can lie
We've seen sites score perfectly on Lighthouse lab tests while a majority of real visitors — measured through Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) field data — experience load times well past Google's threshold. Lab data runs in a controlled environment; the ranking signal comes from real users. A meaningful audit checks both, since lab data alone misses that gap entirely.
Is your site even readable by AI search crawlers?
AI-crawler readiness checks whether bots like PerplexityBot, ChatGPT-User, and Anthropic's crawler can actually access and read your content, the same way a standard audit checks Googlebot access. As AI tools increasingly answer questions directly instead of showing blue links, being blocked from these crawlers — often unintentionally, through a robots.txt rule written for a completely different purpose — means your content is invisible to a growing share of how people now search.
Most technical SEO checklists in circulation still don't cover this. We check it as a standard part of every audit, since fixing Googlebot access alone no longer covers the full range of how content actually gets discovered.
The areas every technical SEO audit covers.
Eight areas, worked in the order that unblocks everything downstream.
Crawlability & indexation
Robots.txt rules, blocked pages, sitemap mismatches, and index bloat — the most fundamental issues, since nothing else matters if Google can't find the page.
Core Web Vitals
LCP, INP, and CLS measured against both lab and CrUX field data, on mobile and desktop separately.
Site architecture
Internal link depth, orphaned pages, and crawl-budget waste, since pages more than 3–4 clicks from the homepage get crawled less and rank worse.
Structured data & schema
Schema markup validation for rich results, AI Overviews, and the structured data modern search increasingly depends on.
Mobile usability
Mobile-first indexing compliance, since Google evaluates the mobile version of your site as the primary version, not the desktop one.
Redirects & canonicalization
Redirect chains, broken internal links, and missing or incorrect canonical tags causing duplicate content issues.
AI-crawler accessibility
Confirming PerplexityBot, ChatGPT-User, and other AI crawlers can access and cite your content, not just Googlebot.
JavaScript rendering
Verification that content built with JavaScript actually renders for Googlebot, checked directly through Search Console's URL inspection.
A clear path from raw crawl data to fixed issues.
Four stages, with every finding ranked by impact before a single fix gets made.
Full site crawl & data pull
We crawl the site and pull Search Console, PageSpeed, and CrUX field data across every priority page.
3–5 days · CrawlIssue identification & prioritization
We rank every finding by ranking impact and implementation effort, not by tool default or alphabetical order.
1 week · AnalysisPrioritized report & fix plan
We deliver 10 to 30 ranked findings with remediation steps, code snippets where relevant, and verification procedures.
2–3 days · DeliveryImplementation & re-crawl
We implement fixes directly, or hand off to your team, then re-crawl to confirm each issue is actually resolved.
2–6 weeks · FixesThe tools we run every audit through.
Combining lab and field data, since either one alone misses real issues.
Semrush Site Audit
PageSpeed Insights
Lighthouse
Google AnalyticsReal technical audits, not a generic scan.
Technical issues get fixed first, because nothing built on top of them holds up otherwise.
Technical SEO · Site Audit · UK & Canada
Full technical audits behind our recent local SEO engagements
Our recent local SEO audits for a Toronto auto recycling business and a UK video production company both started with a full technical audit — redirect chains, mobile-friendliness failures, missing legal and sitemap pages, robots.txt gaps — checked and ranked before any content or citation work began.
Read the case studyExplore more digital marketing services.
Technical SEO is the foundation the rest of our SEO work builds on.
General SEO
Content, authority & organic strategy.
ExploreOn-Page SEO
Titles, headers, content & internal links.
ExploreLocal SEO
Google Business Profile, citations & reviews.
ExploreEnterprise SEO
Crawl budget and migrations at real scale.
ExploreConversion Rate Optimization
Turn crawlable traffic into enquiries.
ExploreSoftware Maintenance
Ongoing fixes for the issues we find.
ExploreUI/UX Design
Layout and interaction work behind CLS and INP.
ExploreBusiness Intelligence
Reporting on what the fixes actually moved.
ExploreTechnical SEO audit questions
The things clients ask us most before starting a technical audit.
A technical SEO audit finds the structural problems on a website that prevent Google from crawling, indexing, and ranking its pages: broken redirects, slow Core Web Vitals scores, blocked pages, missing structured data, and site architecture issues. It's the infrastructure layer underneath everything else in search, and no amount of good content ranks well on top of a broken foundation.
Very common. 72% of websites fail at least one critical technical SEO factor, 95.2% have some form of redirect issue, and only 33% of websites currently pass Google's Core Web Vitals threshold. These aren't edge cases on poorly built sites; they're the statistical norm across the web.
Core Web Vitals are Google's page experience metrics and a confirmed ranking factor. The 2026 thresholds are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) under 0.1, measured separately for mobile and desktop.
Because lab data and field data measure different things. Tools like Lighthouse run in a controlled lab environment; Google's real ranking signal comes from Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) field data, based on actual visitors. A site can score perfectly in a lab test while a majority of real users experience a load time well past Google's threshold, and only field data catches that gap.
AI-crawler readiness checks whether bots like PerplexityBot, ChatGPT-User, and Anthropic's crawler can actually access and read your content, the same way a technical audit checks Googlebot access. As AI tools cite fewer traditional blue links, being blocked from these crawlers — often unintentionally through the same robots.txt rules meant for something else — means your content is invisible to a growing share of search.
A complete technical SEO audit typically finds 10 to 30 prioritized issues, each with a clear business-impact estimate, not a 100-item generic checklist that leaves you unsure what to fix first. We rank findings by ranking impact, not alphabetically or by tool default.
It depends on the issue. Basic fixes like meta tags and sitemap updates are manageable without a developer. Deeper issues involving server configuration, JavaScript rendering, or structured data implementation typically need development support to fix correctly without introducing new problems.
At least annually, after any site migration or redesign, and immediately after any unexplained organic traffic drop. Sites with frequent content or code changes benefit from a lighter quarterly check between full audits.
Both, if you want. We deliver the audit as a prioritized, ranked fix list your team can action independently, and we're equally set up to implement the fixes ourselves, particularly the deeper development-level issues most in-house teams can't touch alone.