The Technical SEO Audit Checklist I Run on Every Site

Before any content or link strategy matters, a site has to be technically sound — Google has to be able to crawl it, understand it, and want to rank it. Here’s the technical audit I run on every site I take on, in the order I run it.

1. Can Google actually find and index it?

This sounds basic, but it’s the single most common thing I find broken. A stray noindex tag left in from staging, a robots.txt blocking crawlers, or a site simply never submitted to Search Console — any of these can make a perfectly good site invisible. Step one is always confirming the site is crawlable and indexable, and that it’s verified in Google Search Console.

2. Is the sitemap doing its job?

A surprising number of sites have a sitemap that actively hurts them — stale, missing, or pointing at pages that 404. This matters enough that I wrote a whole piece on it: why your sitemap is costing you rankings. The sitemap should be current, list only real pages, and carry proper priority, changefreq, and lastmod signals.

3. Canonicals and duplicates

Duplicate content quietly splits your ranking strength. I check that every page has a correct self-referencing canonical, that www and non-www resolve to one version, and that there aren’t multiple URLs serving the same content and competing with each other.

4. Site speed and Core Web Vitals

Speed is a ranking factor and a conversion lever at once. I measure real Core Web Vitals, not just a lab score, and fix what’s actually slowing pages — usually images, render-blocking scripts, and bloat. More on why this matters in website speed is quietly costing you customers.

5. Structure, mobile, and schema

Clean URL structure, genuine mobile usability, and structured data (schema markup) so search engines understand what each page is. Proper schema is how you earn rich results and help Google categorize your business correctly.

6. Internal linking and redirects

Internal links pass authority between pages and help crawlers discover content — a deliberate hub-and-spoke structure beats a pile of orphaned pages. And every old URL from a migration should 301-redirect to its new home, so accumulated authority isn’t thrown away.

Why order matters

You run these in sequence because they build on each other — there’s no point optimizing content on a page Google can’t index. This is the foundation I lay before anything else, on every site from Paint Gunners to Washington Timber. If your site hasn’t had this done, that’s where the fastest gains usually hide — let’s audit it.

Getting this foundation right is the core of my SEO services.