The 30-point technical SEO audit checklist, in the order that matters.
If Google cannot crawl a page, index it, load it quickly on a phone and understand what it is, no amount of writing or link building will rank it. This checklist covers the thirty checks I run on every site, grouped into seven areas, with the tool for each and a tracker you can tick as you go.
By Muhammad Zohaib Ameer, SEO specialist · Updated November 14, 2026 · 9 min read- What: 30 checks in seven groups: crawl, index, speed, mobile, structure, schema, security.
- Order: crawl and index first. A fast page nobody can find is still invisible.
- Tools: Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test and a crawler.
- Rule: record each failed check with evidence, a fix and an owner, or it stays failed.
What does a technical SEO audit check?
A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can crawl, index, load and understand a website, so that its content and links can rank. It covers the robots and sitemap files, status codes and redirects, canonical and noindex tags, Core Web Vitals and page weight, mobile display, URL and link structure, structured data, and HTTPS and security. The output is a list of failed checks, each with evidence, a severity and a fix.
Thirty checks. Tick what passes today.
The button at the end collects every unticked check into a list you can hand to a developer.
Crawl
Index
Speed
Mobile
Structure
Schema
Security
Open Search Console and a crawler, then work down the list.
What each group protects, and what finds the problems.
| Group | What breaks when it fails | Tool that finds it | Typical time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crawl | Google never reaches the page, or wastes its visit on junk URLs | A crawler, robots.txt, the Search Console crawl stats | 1 hour |
| Index | The page is reached but left out of search | Search Console pages report, a site: search | 1 hour |
| Speed | Visitors leave before the page shows, and Core Web Vitals turn red | PageSpeed Insights, the Core Web Vitals report | 1 to 2 hours |
| Mobile | The phone version, which Google uses for indexing, is missing content or unusable | Your own phone, Chrome device mode | 30 minutes |
| Structure | Deep or orphaned pages get little authority and few visits | A crawler's depth and inlinks reports | 1 hour |
| Schema | Google misreads the page and shows a plainer result | Rich Results Test, the Search Console enhancements reports | 30 minutes |
| Security | Trust drops and, in bad cases, pages get flagged or hacked | Browser padlock, Search Console security issues | 20 minutes |
The times are for a site with under a hundred pages, once you know the tools. Not every failed check is urgent: a missing breadcrumb is a tidy-up, a noindex tag on your money pages is an emergency.
If these fail, nothing else counts.
Crawling is Google discovering your URLs. Indexing is Google deciding to keep them. Both have to work before a page can rank, which is why the first ten checks are about them. Start with robots.txt. It should block admin areas, internal search results and filter combinations, and nothing else. I still find sites where a line left over from development blocks the whole site.
Next, status codes and redirects. Run a crawl and sort by status. Every important page should return 200. Old URLs should redirect once, straight to the final page, not through a chain of three hops.
On the index side, open the pages report in Search Console and read the reasons for excluded pages. Pages marked noindex that you meant to rank are not, and that is more common than most owners expect, especially after a redesign.
Google measures the phone version. So should you.
The most common cause of a slow page is still a large image at the top. Compress it, size it for the layout, serve it as WebP or AVIF and let it load first. The second most common cause is scripts: chat widgets, tracking tags and sliders that load before the content. Defer what is not needed for the first screen.
Mobile checks are simpler than they sound: open each key template on your own phone and try to read it, tap it and scroll it. Google indexes the mobile version, so if a section only exists on desktop, Google may never see it.
What each one measures
How long until the biggest image or text block is on screen. Good is 2.5 seconds or less.
How long the page takes to respond when someone taps or clicks. Good is 200 milliseconds or less.
How much the layout jumps while loading. Good is 0.1 or less.
The site looks fine to you. Google sees something else.
Technical problems are invisible from the owner's chair. The site opens on your laptop, the pages look right, the contact form works. Meanwhile a canonical tag points every product page at the home page, or a staging rule blocks the blog. Nothing looks broken, and nothing ranks.
That is why the audit runs on tools, not impressions. A crawler sees what Google sees: every URL, every status code, every tag in the head of the page. Search Console shows what Google decided to do with it. Between the two, the invisible becomes a list.
The other reason problems hide is that they arrive quietly. A plugin update adds a noindex. A developer copies the robots file from staging. A new theme doubles the page weight.
How the site is built, and how it is described.
Structure is about how pages connect. Important pages should sit within three clicks of the home page, URLs should read like a sentence, and breadcrumbs should match the folders. A crawler's depth report shows pages buried six clicks deep, and its inlinks report shows orphans with no internal link at all.
Schema, or structured data, is code that tells Google what a page is: a local business, an article, a product, a set of questions. It should describe only what a visitor can see on the page. Test the home page and each key template in the Rich Results Test, and read the enhancements reports in Search Console for errors that appear after changes.
Security checks are quick: HTTPS on every page with no mixed content, one redirect from HTTP, an up-to-date CMS, and an empty security issues report in Search Console. If that report is not empty, fix it before anything else.
Turn the checklist into a working document.
| Check | Status | Evidence | Severity | Fix | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No live page carries a noindex tag by accident | Fail | 14 service pages excluded in Search Console, tag found in theme header | Critical | Remove the tag from the template, request indexing | Developer |
| Images compressed and served in WebP | Fail | Home page hero 2.3 MB JPEG, LCP 5.1 s on mobile | High | Resize to 1600 px, convert to WebP, add fetchpriority | Designer |
| Breadcrumbs match the site hierarchy | Pass | Checked on 5 templates | None | None | None |
Copy the thirty checks into a spreadsheet with these six columns. Severity is critical, high, medium or low, judged by what the failure does to leads. The owner is a named person. The rows above are an example of the format, not a real client.
Sort by severity and the sheet becomes the work order. If you want this inside a full audit with content, links and local presence, the SEO audit template covers all seven sections, and how often to audit a site explains the schedule.
Technical SEO audit FAQ.
What is a technical SEO audit?
Which tools do I need for a technical SEO audit?
How long does a technical audit take?
How often should I run a technical SEO audit?
Is a technical SEO audit template different from a checklist?
I do the work myselfOne specialist. No hand-offs.
I'm Muhammad Zohaib Ameer. I have worked in SEO since 2022 for businesses in the US, UK, Canada and the UAE. I run this exact checklist before I touch content or links on any site, because fixing the ceiling first makes everything after it work better.
“The most expensive technical problem I see is not the dramatic one. It is the small noindex or canonical mistake that sat unnoticed for a year while the owner paid for content that could never rank.”
Muhammad Zohaib Ameer · OvaVerseWant the thirty checks run on your site?
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The photo on this page is a custom AI-generated illustration, not a real client or event. Diagrams and sample numbers are labelled illustrations; case study screenshots are real.