A technical SEO audit checks whether Google can find, crawl, understand and index your website. Content and links count for little if Google can’t reach your pages or load them properly.
Technical problems are easy to miss, because a site can look fine to visitors while Google struggles with it. These are the areas we check first on a small business website.
Pages Google Can’t Index
- A noindex tag left on from when the site was being built.
- Pages blocked by the robots.txt file.
- Important pages missing from the XML sitemap, or old pages still listed in it.
- Pages Google has crawled but chosen not to index, which often points to thin or duplicate content.
Search Console’s Pages report shows which pages are indexed and why others aren’t. It’s the first place we look.
Duplicate and Missing Titles
Title tags and meta descriptions are often duplicated across pages, left blank or set to the page name only. Each page needs its own title that describes what it offers. Duplicate titles also make it harder for Google to tell pages apart.
Broken Links and Redirect Chains
Over time, pages get deleted or renamed and links break. A crawler such as Screaming Frog finds internal links pointing to missing pages, and redirects that bounce through several steps before reaching the right page. Update those links so they point straight at the final address.
Slow Pages
Speed problems usually come from a handful of causes:
- Images uploaded far larger than they’re displayed.
- Fonts that load late and make the text jump around.
- Too many plugins or scripts loading on every page.
- Lazy-loading applied to the main image at the top of the page, which delays the part visitors see first.
We found some of these on our own site. After we restyled it, our PageSpeed score dropped. The fixes were resizing images to the size they’re displayed at, changing how our fonts load and adjusting our lazy-loading settings.
A website can look perfect to visitors and still be hard work for Google.
Mobile Problems
Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing. Text that’s too small, buttons too close together or content hidden on mobile can all hold a site back. Check your key pages on a phone, not just in a narrowed desktop browser.
Orphan Pages and Weak Internal Links
An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it, so neither visitors nor Google can find it easily. Important pages should be linked from your menu or from related pages, with link text that describes where the link goes.
Structured Data Errors
Schema markup helps search engines understand your business and your content. Problems include markup with errors, markup that doesn’t match what’s on the page and two plugins adding the same schema twice. Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator show what’s on each page.
How to Run a Basic Audit Yourself
- Check the Pages report in Search Console for pages that aren’t indexed.
- Run a free crawl of up to 500 URLs with Screaming Frog.
- Test your main pages in PageSpeed Insights.
- Check your key pages on a phone.
Technical audits are a core part of our SEO services in Sussex.
Structured data is a technical area that small businesses often skip. In the next post, we show you how to add schema markup with Google Tag Manager and AI.