A technical SEO audit is essential for uncovering hidden problems that may prevent your pages from ranking well in search results. Technical SEO strategies focus on improving how search engines crawl, index, and interpret your site. Ignoring these technical aspects can result in poor visibility even if your content is strong. This blog walks you through the key steps to identify and fix these underlying issues for better site performance.

How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit?

The steps given below will guide you through performing a thorough technical SEO audit.

1. Spot and Fix Crawlability and Indexability Issues

To improve your website ranking, search engines must be able to find and understand your content. This starts with ensuring that your pages can be crawled and indexed properly.

Search engine bots discover pages by following internal links and analyzing code and content. These pages are then stored in a massive database, which is used to serve relevant results for user queries.

Two key files—robots.txt and sitemap.xml—play a central role in how your website is discovered and processed. Both should be reviewed carefully as part of any website optimization effort.

Check for Robots.txt Issues

The robots.txt file, located at your site’s root (e.g., https://example.com/robots.txt), guides bots on which pages or folders to crawl or ignore.

This file can:

Prevent indexing of private or irrelevant folders
Reduce unnecessary strain on server resources
Highlight the location of your sitemap

Even a single misconfigured line in this file can block entire sections of your site from being indexed. Here are a few common issues to look for:

Syntax errors that unintentionally block important content or allow sensitive areas to be indexed.
Missing sitemap reference, which can make it harder for bots to understand your site’s structure.
Blocked internal resources like CSS or JavaScript, which may prevent search engines from rendering and evaluating your pages correctly.
Blocked external resources, such as third-party scripts or files, that might affect how bots interpret your content.

Check for Sitemap.xml Issues

Your sitemap lists the URLs that you want search engines to index. A clean, accurate sitemap supports better website performance in search results.

During a regular website audit, check that:

Only relevant pages are listed—exclude login screens, account dashboards, or gated content.
The sitemap is formatted correctly, without broken tags or invalid entries.
It doesn’t include duplicate, broken, or non-canonical pages that may waste your crawl budget.
HTTPS sites don’t list HTTP URLs, as this causes inconsistencies in how your pages are interpreted.
Orphaned pages (those not linked from anywhere else on your site) are kept to a minimum.

2. Audit Your Site Architecture

Site architecture is how your pages are structured and linked together. A well-organized site benefits both users and search engines. It improves navigation, ensures better crawl coverage, and supports long-term scalability.

Let’s focus on three key elements: hierarchy, navigation, and URL structure.

Review Site Hierarchy

Your site’s hierarchy refers to how pages are grouped into subfolders. A flat structure (where important pages are within three clicks from the homepage) is generally better for search engine visibility.

If certain pages are buried too deep, they may be considered less relevant by search engines. Add internal links to these deeper pages to improve their visibility and access.

Evaluate Navigation

Site navigation elements—menus, breadcrumbs, and footers—should help users move through the site with ease. Good navigation mirrors your content structure and improves user engagement.

Follow these best practices:

Keep it simple. Avoid complex mega menus or unconventional labels. For example, use “Blog” instead of something vague like “Idea Lab.”
Use breadcrumbs. These help users understand where they are and move easily between related pages, while also reinforcing your site’s structure for search engines.

Check URL Structure

Your URLs should reflect your site’s layout and be easy to understand. For instance, a logical path for girls’ footwear might look like:

domain.com/children/girls/footwear

If you serve content by country, consider using country-specific paths or domains, such as domain.com/ca or domain.ca.

Also, check for common URL issues flagged by a site audit tool:

Underscores in URLs. Search engines treat “blue_shoes” differently from “blue-shoes.” Hyphens are preferred.
Excessive parameters. Long query strings (like ?color=blue&size=large) can clutter URLs and confuse search engines.
Overly long URLs. Browsers may struggle with very long addresses, and users are less likely to click or share them.

3. Fix Internal Linking Issues

Internal links connect one page to another within the same website. They are a critical part of your site’s structure, helping distribute link equity (also called authority) and guiding both users and search engines through your content.

When performing a technical review, check for broken internal links—these point to pages that no longer exist. They waste crawl budget and interrupt the user journey. Fortunately, these are usually simple to identify and fix.

You should also look for pages that have few or no internal links pointing to them. These might be underperforming simply because they’re harder to find or are not seen as important by search engines.

To build a stronger internal linking framework, follow these best practices:

Integrate internal linking into your content planning process
Link new pages from existing, relevant content as soon as they are published
Avoid linking to URLs with redirects; link directly to the final destination
Use clear, relevant anchor text that accurately describes the linked page
Prioritize linking to your most valuable or high-converting pages
Don’t overload your pages with too many internal links—keep them useful and relevant
Understand how and when to use the nofollow attribute to control link equity flow

4. Spot and Fix Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content refers to identical or near-identical text appearing on multiple webpages. It can lead to several issues:

Google may rank the wrong version of your content
The best-performing pages may struggle to appear in search results
Indexing can become inconsistent or incomplete
Page authority may get diluted across duplicates
Tracking content performance becomes harder

Two of the most common causes of duplicate content are multiple URL versions and parameter-based URLs.

Multiple Versions of URLs

Your site might be accessible through different variations, such as:

HTTP and HTTPS
www and non-www

For search engines, each of these represents a separate version of the site. If the same page exists at more than one of these URLs, it’s treated as duplicate content.

Fix: Choose a preferred version of your domain and set up 301 redirects from the alternatives. This consolidates indexing and page authority.

URL Parameters

Parameters like ?color=red&size=large are often used to sort or filter content, especially on ecommerce sites. However, they can generate different URLs with mostly the same content, triggering duplicate issues.

Fix:

Minimize unnecessary parameters where possible
Use canonical tags to point to the main version of each page
Configure your audit tool to exclude parameterized URLs to avoid analyzing duplicate versions

Managing duplicates ensures the right pages rank well and that authority isn’t split across multiple versions of the same content.

5. Audit Your Site Performance

Site speed plays a major role in overall user experience and remains an important factor in how Google ranks pages.

When analyzing performance, focus on two key metrics:

Page speed: How long it takes a single page to load
Site speed: The average load time across a selection of pages

Improving the speed of individual pages directly improves overall site speed.

To help with this, Google offers PageSpeed Insights, a tool designed to identify performance issues and offer optimization suggestions. It evaluates your pages across four categories:

Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO

6. Discover Mobile-Friendliness Issues

More than half of web traffic happens on mobile devices.

Google mainly indexes the mobile version of websites rather than the desktop version. This is called mobile-first indexing.

It is important to make sure your website works well on mobile devices.

Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to quickly check how specific URLs perform on mobile.

A viewport meta tag is an HTML tag that helps your page adjust to different screen sizes. It changes the page size automatically based on the user’s device if your design is responsive.

Another way to improve mobile performance is to use Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMPs. These are simplified versions of your pages that load quickly on mobile devices because Google serves them from its cache instead of your server.

If you use AMPs, audit them regularly to confirm they are correctly implemented and continue to boost your mobile visibility.

7. Spot and Fix Code Issues

Search engines do not see a webpage like humans do. They only see the underlying code.

It is important to use proper syntax and relevant tags and attributes that help search engines understand your site.

During your technical SEO audit, review different parts of your website code and markup, including HTML (with its tags and attributes), JavaScript, and structured data.

Let’s break these down.

Meta Tag Issues

Meta tags are snippets of text that provide search engine bots with additional information about a page’s content. These tags are found in your page’s header within the HTML code.

You should be familiar with the following meta tags:

Title tag: This shows the title of a page. Search engines use it to form the clickable link in search results.
Meta description: A brief description of a page. While it does not directly affect rankings, a well-optimized meta description can improve click-through rates and help your result stand out.

Common meta tag problems include:

Missing title tags: Pages without a title tag may be seen as low quality by search engines and miss an opportunity to tell users and search engines what the page is about.
Duplicate title tags: When multiple pages have the same title, it is hard for search engines to determine which page is most relevant for a search. This can hurt rankings.
Title tags that are too long: Titles longer than 70 characters might get cut off in search results, making them less appealing.
Title tags that are too short: Titles with fewer than 10 characters do not provide enough information about the page.
Missing meta descriptions: Without one, search engines might use random text from the page as the snippet, which can reduce click-through rates.
Duplicate meta descriptions: Using the same meta description on multiple pages reduces your chance to use relevant keywords and differentiate pages.
Pages with meta refresh tags: This outdated technique can cause SEO and usability problems. Use proper redirects instead.

Canonical Tag Issues

Canonical tags indicate the main copy of a page when there are duplicates. They tell search engines which page to index.

The canonical tag is placed in the head section of the page code and looks like this:

Common issues include:

Missing canonical tags on AMP pages: Without these, search engines may get confused about which version to show.
No redirect or canonical tag from HTTP to HTTPS homepage: This splits SEO efforts.
Broken canonical links: If the canonical tag points to a non-existent page, it wastes crawl budget.
Multiple canonical URLs on one page: This gives conflicting directions to search engines.

Hreflang Attribute Issues

The hreflang attribute tells search engines the language and target region of a page. It helps show the right version to users based on location and language.

Common problems include:

Missing hreflang and lang attributes: Without these, search engines cannot determine the language or which version to show.
Conflicting hreflang information in the page source: This causes search engines to show the wrong language version.
Incorrect country or language codes: This prevents proper identification of the target audience.
Broken or redirecting hreflang links: These make it hard for search engines to crawl and index multilingual content.
Mismatched hreflang and page language: This causes users to land on pages they cannot understand.

Fixing these issues ensures international users see the correct content, improving user experience and global SEO results.

JavaScript Issues

JavaScript creates interactive elements on pages. Search engines like Google use JavaScript files to render pages. If they cannot properly render these files, pages may not be indexed correctly.

Common JavaScript issues include:

Unminified JavaScript and CSS files: These files contain unnecessary spaces and comments. Minifying them reduces file size and improves load speed.
Uncompressed JavaScript and CSS: Compression further reduces file size.
Large total size of JavaScript and CSS: If combined files exceed 2 megabytes after minification and compression, they slow page loading and hurt user experience.
Uncached JavaScript and CSS: Without caching, browsers reload these files on every visit, increasing load time.
Too many JavaScript and CSS files: Over 100 files cause many server requests, slowing down the site.
Broken external JavaScript and CSS files: These cause errors affecting user experience and indexing.

To check how Google renders pages using JavaScript, use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console.

Structured Data Issues

Structured data is formatted markup that gives search engines additional details about your content.

Schema.org is a popular markup vocabulary used to help search engines understand page content and enable special search result features, called rich results or SERP features.

Examples of SERP features include:

Featured snippets
Reviews
FAQs

8. Check for and Fix HTTPS Issues

Your website should use the HTTPS protocol rather than HTTP, which is not encrypted. This means your site runs on a secure server with an SSL certificate issued by a trusted third-party vendor.

An SSL certificate confirms that your site is legitimate and builds user trust by showing a padlock icon next to the URL in the browser.

HTTPS is also a confirmed ranking signal for search engines.

Implementing HTTPS is usually straightforward but can sometimes lead to issues. Common problems include:

Expired certificate: Your security certificate must be renewed before it expires.
Outdated security protocol: Your site might be running an old version of SSL or TLS, which can reduce security.
No server name indication: This shows whether your server supports Server Name Indication (SNI), which allows hosting multiple certificates on a single IP address to improve security.
Mixed content: This happens when your site loads both secure (HTTPS) and insecure (HTTP) content, which can trigger a “not secure” warning in browsers.

9. Find and Fix Problematic Status Codes

HTTP status codes show how a website server responds when a browser requests to load a page.

1XX status codes are informational and 2XX codes indicate a successful request. These do not require your attention.

Focus on these three categories: 3XX, 4XX, and 5XX status codes and how to handle them.

3XX Status Codes

These indicate redirects. This means when users or search engine crawlers visit a page, they are sent to a different page. Redirects are not always a problem but must be used properly to avoid issues.

4XX Status Codes

These errors mean a requested page cannot be accessed. The most common example is the 404 error which means the page was not found.

5XX Status Codes

These are server-side errors showing that the server failed to complete the request. Reasons can include the server being temporarily unavailable, incorrect server setup, or server overload.

Investigate why these errors occur and fix them if possible. Look at your server logs, review any recent server configuration changes, and monitor your server’s performance metrics.

10. Perform Log File Analysis

Your website’s log file keeps a record of every visitor and bot that accesses your site.

Analyzing these log files allows you to see your website from the perspective of a web crawler. This helps you understand what happens when a search engine visits your site.

Log file analysis can answer important questions such as:

Are errors stopping my website from being fully crawled?
Which pages receive the most crawls?
Which pages are not being crawled at all?
Are structural problems affecting access to some pages?
How well is my crawl budget being used?

Finding answers to these questions will guide your SEO efforts and help fix issues related to crawling and indexing your webpages.

Conclusion

Performing a comprehensive technical SEO audit focused on technical elements can significantly improve how your website performs in search rankings. While content and links are essential, neglecting the technical foundation can hold your site back. Regular site reviews will help maintain optimal visibility and user experience. By following the methods discussed in this guide, you can strengthen your website’s overall performance and stay ahead in search results.

Technical SEO Audit: How to Find and Fix Site Issues