[Insights](https://dayvandi.ai/insights) # How to Do a Technical SEO Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide A step-by-step technical SEO audit checklist: crawling, indexing, rendering, site structure, page experience and structured data, including AI crawler access. By [Raz Dayvandi](https://dayvandi.ai/about). Published October 31, 2026, updated November 8, 2026. 6 min read. ![How to Do a Technical SEO Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide](https://dayvandi.ai/brand/insights/technical-seo-audit-guide.webp) **In short:** a technical SEO audit checks whether search engines and AI crawlers can reach, render and index your important pages, and whether anything on the site sends them mixed signals. Work through crawl, canonicalization, indexing, crawler access, rendering, structure, duplication, page experience and structured data, then rank every finding by impact and effort. Key takeaways - A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines and AI crawlers can reach, render and index your important pages. - Most technical issues repeat across page templates, so fixing one template fixes many pages at once. - AI crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot need deliberate access in robots.txt and firewall settings. - Findings are only useful when ranked by impact and effort and written as tasks with an owner. You can have the best content in your industry and still be invisible if search engines cannot reach it, render it or decide which version to index. A technical audit is how you find those problems before they cost you traffic. This is the process I use, rebuilt from guides I published in 2015 and 2020. Plenty of the old advice has aged out, so there is a note at the end on what to ignore from older checklists. ## What does a technical SEO audit check? | Area | What to check | Main tools | | --- | --- | --- | | Crawl | Status codes, redirect chains, broken links, orphan pages | Screaming Frog or Sitebulb | | One version per page | HTTPS, www, trailing slashes, parameters, canonicals | Crawler, browser | | Indexing | Excluded pages, noindex tags, sitemap contents | Search Console Pages report | | Crawler access | robots.txt, firewall and CDN rules, AI crawlers | robots.txt, Cloudflare or CDN settings | | Rendering | Content and links that depend on JavaScript | Search Console URL Inspection | | Structure | Click depth, internal links, cannibalization | Crawler, Search Console | | Duplication | Variants, filters, thin or near-duplicate pages | Crawler | | Page experience | LCP, INP, CLS, mobile, HTTPS | Search Console Core Web Vitals | | Structured data | Valid markup that matches visible content | Rich Results Test, Schema.org validator | The steps below cover each area in order. ## 1\. Set the scope and gather data Before crawling anything, collect what you will need: - Access to Google Search Console and GA4 - A crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb - A list of the site’s main page templates (home, category, product or service, article, location) - Server log files, if you can get them, for larger sites Templates matter because most technical issues repeat across every page built from the same template. Fix the template and you fix hundreds of pages at once. ## 2\. Crawl the site Run a full crawl and review: - Status codes: 4xx errors, 5xx errors and unexpected redirects - Redirect chains and loops - Broken internal links - Orphan pages that exist in the sitemap or analytics but receive no internal links A redirect is fine when a page has genuinely moved. Long chains of redirects, or internal links pointing at redirected URLs, waste crawl effort and slow users down. ## 3\. Make sure there is one version of every page Search engines should see exactly one version of your site and of each page. Check that HTTP redirects to HTTPS, that www and non-www resolve to one host, and that trailing slashes and URL parameters do not create duplicate URLs. Each page should carry a canonical tag pointing to its preferred URL. ## 4\. Check what is actually indexed Use the Pages report under Indexing in Search Console to see which URLs are indexed and why others are not. Look for: - Important pages excluded by a stray noindex tag - Pages marked “Crawled, currently not indexed,” which often points to thin or duplicate content - XML sitemaps that list redirected, broken or noindexed URLs. A sitemap should contain only canonical, indexable pages that return a 200 status. A site: search in Google is a rough sense check at best. It is not a reliable count of indexed pages. ## 5\. Review crawler access, including AI crawlers Read your robots.txt file line by line. Then check whether your firewall or CDN blocks any bots, because some security settings block crawlers without anyone noticing. AI platforms now run their own crawlers. OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot supports ChatGPT search, and PerplexityBot supports Perplexity. Blocking them makes it much harder for those platforms to cite you. Decide deliberately which bots you allow, rather than inheriting a default. ## 6\. Test rendering If your site relies on JavaScript, compare the raw HTML with the rendered page. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows how Google renders a page. Key content, links and structured data should not depend on scripts that may fail or load late. Not every AI crawler renders JavaScript, so server-rendered content is the safer choice. ## 7\. Review site structure and internal links Important pages should be reachable within a few clicks of the homepage, and internal links should reflect how topics relate. This is also where keyword cannibalization shows up: two or more of your own pages competing for the same search. Picture a fudge shop whose homepage keeps ranking for its signature almond chocolate bar instead of the product page that can actually close the sale. Distinct page content and internal links that consistently point to the right page tell search engines which one should rank. ## 8\. Find duplicate and thin content Duplicate content rarely causes a penalty, despite what older articles claim. The real problem is that it splits signals across several URLs and leaves search engines to guess which one matters. Common sources are product variants, filtered category pages, printer-friendly versions and boilerplate location pages. Consolidate, canonicalize or improve them. ## 9\. Check page experience Review Core Web Vitals in Search Console, which uses field data from real visitors: - Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) for loading - Interaction to Next Paint (INP) for responsiveness - Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) for visual stability Also confirm the site works well on mobile, since Google indexes the mobile version of pages, and that every page is served over HTTPS. ## 10\. Validate structured data Test key templates with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. Markup should describe content that is actually visible on the page. Schema that does not match the page is ignored at best, and can trigger a manual action at worst. Done well, it helps search engines and AI systems understand your organization, services and content. ## 11\. Review on-page basics at the template level Check titles, H1 headings, meta descriptions and image alt text across templates rather than page by page. Meta descriptions do not directly affect rankings, but they shape the snippet people see and whether they click. ## 12\. Check international setup, if relevant If you serve multiple countries or languages, check that hreflang annotations are complete and reciprocal, and that each version is indexable. ## 13\. Prioritize and write it up An audit is only useful if it gets acted on. Rank every finding by likely impact on visibility and effort to fix, then write each one as a task: what is wrong, where, why it matters, how to fix it and who owns it. A short list of high-impact fixes beats a 200-row export nobody reads. ## What should you ignore from older checklists? - **Keyword density targets.** Write clearly for the topic. There is no magic percentage. - **AMP as a requirement.** Fast, well-built pages do the job. - **“100 links per page” rules.** Link where it helps users, not to hit a number. - **“200 ranking factors” lists.** They were always speculation dressed up as precision. - **Social share buttons for SEO.** Shares are not a ranking factor. If you would rather have the audit done for you, that is what the [Dayvandi SEO audit](https://dayvandi.ai/seo-audit) covers, along with content, authority and AI visibility. ## Related - [SEO audit](https://dayvandi.ai/seo-audit): Have Dayvandi audit your site and build the roadmap. - [Technical SEO](https://dayvandi.ai/technical-seo): What technical SEO covers and why it matters. - [How to choose an SEO consultant](https://dayvandi.ai/insights/how-to-choose-an-seo-consultant): What to check before hiring help. ## Talk through your search visibility Share what you are working on and where search performance is falling short. We will tell you plainly whether consulting is a fit and what we would look at first. [Schedule an SEO consultation](https://dayvandi.ai/contact) --- Source: https://dayvandi.ai/insights/technical-seo-audit-guide