Running a technical SEO audit sounds like it requires a developer background. It does not, and most of it requires knowing where to look and what the results mean.
This guide walks through the process step by step, in the order that actually matters. Technical issues have a dependency structure and some problems make it pointless to check others until they are fixed first. Following this order means you are not wasting time investigating content or speed issues on pages Google cannot even access yet.
You will need two free tools before starting: Google Search Console and Google PageSpeed Insights. A free crawling tool, Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs), will also be necessary for several steps. Set all three up before beginning.
Step 1: Check for Manual Actions and Security Issues
Start here because if either of these exists, nothing else you find in this audit matters until it is resolved.
In Google Search Console go to Security & Manual Actions in the left sidebar. Check both the Manual Actions and Security Issues sections.
A manual action means Google has directly penalized your site for violating its guidelines; spammy links, cloaking, thin content, or other policy violations. A security issue means Google has detected malware, hacked content, or another compromise on your site.
Both are severe, and both prevent normal ranking regardless of how well everything else is optimized. If either section shows anything other than “No issues detected,” resolving that issue is your entire priority before proceeding further in this audit.
Step 2: Confirm Google Can Crawl Your Site
Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. Read through what it contains.
Look specifically for any line that says Disallow: /, this blocks Google from crawling your entire website and is the single most catastrophic technical SEO error possible. It sometimes happens accidentally during a site migration or redesign when a rule meant to keep a staging environment private accidentally carries over to the live site.
Beyond that catch-all check, look for any Disallow rules blocking specific important sections of your site, your blog, your service pages, your images folder if you want image search traffic. Confirm nothing important is being excluded that should not be.
If you find an unwanted disallow rule, remove it and save the corrected robots.txt file to your site’s root directory.
Step 3: Confirm Your Pages Are Indexed
In Google Search Console go to Pages under the Indexing section. This report shows you two categories: indexed pages and pages that are not indexed, broken down by the specific reason.
Review the “Not indexed” tab carefully. Some exclusions are intentional and fine, pages you deliberately noindexed, or duplicate pages Google has correctly consolidated through a canonical tag. Others are problems, important pages excluded due to a crawl error, a server error, or an accidental noindex tag.
Cross-reference this list against your actual important pages such as your homepage, service pages, location pages, and key blog content. If any of them appear in the “not indexed” list for a reason that was not intentional, that page needs immediate attention.
Step 4: Run a Full Site Crawl
Open Screaming Frog, enter your domain, and run a full crawl. For most small business websites this takes a few minutes.
Once complete, work through these specific reports within the tool:
Response Codes: filter for anything other than 200 (success). Look specifically for 404 errors (broken pages), 500 errors (server errors), and 301/302 redirects. A handful of 404s on genuinely removed old content is normal. 404s on pages that should exist, or a large number of 404s generally, need investigation.
Redirect Chains: Screaming Frog has a dedicated report for this. Any redirect chain longer than one hop (URL A redirects to URL B which redirects to URL C) should be fixed so URL A redirects directly to the final destination.
Titles: check for missing title tags, duplicate title tags across multiple pages, and titles that are too long (generally over 60 characters, though Screaming Frog flags based on pixel width). Export this list and prioritize fixing duplicates on your most important pages first.
Meta Description: same check as titles: missing, duplicate, or too long.
H1: check for pages with no H1, or pages with multiple H1 tags. Every page should have exactly one.
Canonicals: check that canonical tags exist and point to the correct URL, particularly on any pages that could be accessed through multiple URL variations.
Images: check the Alt Text report for images missing descriptive alt text, particularly on important pages.
Export each of these reports and build a working list of specific pages that need fixes, organized by issue type.
Step 5: Check for Duplicate Content
Using the crawl data from Step 4, look specifically for pages with identical or near-identical title tags and meta descriptions. This is often the fastest way to spot duplicate content within Screaming Frog’s export.
Manually check whether your site loads at multiple root variations — try yourdomain.com, www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com/, and http://yourdomain.com (without the S). All variations should redirect to a single, consistent version. If more than one loads as a separate, non-redirecting page, that is a duplicate content problem affecting your entire site.
For ecommerce or filtered content sites, check whether filter and sort options generate separate indexable URLs for what is substantially the same content. If a product category page generates a new URL for every combination of size, color, and price filter, and all of those URLs are indexable, that is a significant duplicate content issue worth addressing with canonical tags or by blocking the filtered URL patterns from indexing.
Step 6: Test Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
Go to Google PageSpeed Insights and test your homepage first, then your most important service and location pages.
Record the mobile score specifically – mobile is what Google evaluates primarily, and mobile scores are typically lower than desktop scores due to processing power and connection speed differences accounted for in the test.
Check the Core Web Vitals section for each page: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Each should show “Good.” Note any that show “Needs Improvement” or “Poor.”
Below the score, PageSpeed Insights lists specific opportunities and diagnostics – the exact issues slowing the page down, ranked by potential impact. Common findings include unoptimized images, render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, and excessive third-party scripts. Note the top two or three highest-impact items for each page you test.
Step 7: Test Mobile Usability
Open your website on an actual mobile phone and not a browser’s mobile simulation mode, which does not always accurately reflect real mobile rendering.
Navigate through your most important pages. Check specifically for: text that requires zooming to read, buttons or links that are too small or too close together to tap accurately, horizontal scrolling required to see content, and any elements that overlap or appear broken on a smaller screen.
Also check Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report by device type, which will show you if mobile pages specifically are failing Core Web Vitals thresholds even if desktop performance looks fine.
Step 8: Verify HTTPS Implementation
Confirm your site shows a padlock icon with no warnings in the browser address bar across multiple pages, not just the homepage.
Type your domain into a browser using plain http:// (without the S) and confirm it automatically redirects to the https:// version. If it does not redirect, both versions of your site are technically live and accessible, a duplicate content problem.
Run your site through a free mixed content checker (search “mixed content checker” for several free options) to confirm no resources are loading over an insecure connection on your secure pages.
Check your SSL certificate expiration date through your hosting provider or a free SSL checker tool, and confirm it is not approaching expiration.
Step 9: Check Your XML Sitemap
Go to yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml and confirm it loads correctly and lists your important pages.
In Google Search Console go to Sitemaps under the Indexing section and confirm your sitemap is submitted and showing no errors. Compare the number of URLs submitted against the number successfully indexed — a large gap between the two numbers is worth investigating further using the Pages report from Step 3.
Confirm the sitemap does not include pages that should not be indexed — old URLs, pages with a noindex tag, or duplicate content variations. A sitemap should only list the canonical, indexable version of each important page.
Step 10: Review Structured Data
Use Google’s Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results) to check individual pages for structured data errors. Test your homepage, your most important service pages, and any page with an FAQ section.
The tool will show you what structured data types it detects on the page and flag any errors or warnings in the implementation. A missing schema type on a page that should have one (a service page with no Service schema, an FAQ page with no FAQPage schema) is a missed opportunity worth addressing. An error in existing schema, technically present but incorrectly formatted, should be fixed as a priority since incorrect schema can actively prevent the enhanced search result it was meant to enable.
Also check Google Search Console’s Enhancements section, which reports structured data issues across your entire site rather than page by page.
Step 11: Check Internal Linking Structure
Using your Screaming Frog crawl from Step 4, check the Inlinks report for each of your important pages. This shows how many internal links point to each page from elsewhere on your site.
Identify any important pages with zero or very few internal links pointing to them . These are effectively orphaned or under-linked, and are both harder for Google to discover and receiving less authority distribution than they should be.
Cross-reference this against the crawl depth data Screaming Frog provides, how many clicks away from the homepage each page sits. Important pages that are more than three or four clicks deep in your site structure are candidates for better internal linking or navigation placement.
Step 12: Compile Your Findings Into a Prioritized List
By this point you have gathered findings across crawlability, indexing, duplicate content, speed, mobile, HTTPS, sitemaps, structured data, and internal linking.
Organize everything into three priority tiers:
Fix immediately
Anything blocking Google from crawling or indexing important pages, manual actions or security issues, and any HTTPS implementation problems allowing duplicate content across HTTP and HTTPS versions.
Fix soon
Page speed issues on important pages, missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions on key pages, broken internal links, and redirect chains.
Fix when possible
Missing alt text, minor structured data gaps, internal linking improvements for lower-priority pages, and sitemap cleanup.
This prioritization is the actual output of the audit. A long list of findings with no prioritization tells you what is wrong without telling you what to do first, and what to do first is the part that actually matters.
How Long This Actually Takes
For a small business website with 20 to 50 pages, working through all twelve steps carefully takes roughly four to six hours spread across a day or two, most of it spent reviewing crawl data and testing individual pages rather than any single complex step.
For a larger site with hundreds of pages, the crawl and review process takes proportionally longer, and issues like crawl budget and faceted navigation duplication become more relevant considerations that this basic process may need to be expanded to address more thoroughly.
What to Do If You Find Something You Do Not Know How to Fix
Some findings from this process, a fundamentally broken robots.txt, a complex duplicate content issue caused by your site’s underlying platform architecture, a Core Web Vitals problem rooted in your site’s theme or template code, require either development knowledge or platform-specific expertise to resolve correctly.
Identifying the problem through this audit process is valuable even if you cannot fix every issue yourself. A clear, specific list of technical problems is something you can hand to a developer or an SEO professional and get resolved far more efficiently than a vague instruction to “look into our SEO.”
If you have run through this process and want a second opinion, or want help resolving what you have found, Ranqeo’s technical SEO services include a comprehensive audit and direct implementation of the fixes it identifies.