A technical SEO audit checks whether Google can find, read and correctly evaluate a site's pages at all, and it takes from one to five working days depending on the size of the project. Below is a 25-point checklist in eight blocks: indexing, structure and URLs, speed, mobile, duplicates and canonical, meta tags, links and redirects, security. For each block we name the tools to check with, and at the end we give a rule for sorting the findings by priority so that the developer does not spend a week on "nice to have" instead of "critical".
A content audit answers the question "does the site have what people search for, and is it written better than the competitors' pages". A technical audit answers a different one: "does that reach Google without losses". A site can have the best copy in its niche and get no traffic because half the pages are blocked in robots.txt and the other half serve parameter duplicates. That is why in a full website SEO audit the technical part comes first: until the foundation is fixed, there is no point evaluating content and links, because the numbers in Search Console are lying.
Another difference is who does the work. Content fixes are made by a copywriter and a marketer, technical ones almost always by a developer. So the output of a technical audit should be a technical brief with specific URLs and examples, not a list of recommendations like "improve speed".
| # | What we check | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | robots.txt | /catalog/, CSS or JS blocked; no Sitemap: |
| 2 | Meta robots and X-Robots-Tag | noindex on important pages |
| 3 | Sitemap.xml | Redirects, 404s, noindex in the map |
| 4 | Indexing in Search Console | Many "discovered, not indexed" |
| # | What we check | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Click depth | Products 5-6 levels deep, no menu path |
| 6 | URL format | Parameters, Cyrillic, mixed case |
| 7 | Breadcrumbs and sections | One page in two categories, two URLs |
| # | What we check | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 8 | Core Web Vitals (field data) | LCP over 2.5 s on mobile |
| 9 | Server response time (TTFB) | Over 600-800 ms, no caching |
| 10 | Page weight | 2-3 MB photos, five trackers in head |
We covered the speed metrics and where to find them in detail in the article on Core Web Vitals; here we will only note that Google evaluates field data from real users, so a lab score of 100 in PageSpeed guarantees nothing on its own.
| # | What we check | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | Mobile and desktop parity | Text or menu hidden on mobile |
| 12 | Mobile usability | Horizontal scroll, full-screen popups |
| # | What we check | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 13 | Mirrors: http/https, www, slash | Two versions return 200 |
| 14 | rel="canonical" on every page | Canonical to homepage or missing |
| 15 | Sort, filter, utm parameters | Thousands of ?sort= URLs indexed |
| # | What we check | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 16 | Title: unique, up to 60-70 characters | Same title on hundreds of pages |
| 17 | Description: unique, up to 160 | Empty or copied from the first paragraph |
| 18 | One H1, logical H2-H3 | Several H1s, headings used as button styles |
| # | What we check | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 19 | Broken links and links to redirects | Moved URLs still in the menu |
| 20 | Redirect chains and loops | Three hops to the final URL |
| 21 | Orphan pages | In the sitemap, no internal links |
| 22 | Hreflang: reciprocity, codes, x-default | Code ua instead of uk, no return links |
| # | What we check | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|
| 23 | HTTPS and certificate | Mixed content, certificate expiring |
| 24 | Security and manual actions in Search Console | Any entry in those reports |
| 25 | CMS updates, third-party scripts | Two-year-old CMS, unknown domains |
Four tools cover almost the entire checklist. The rest (markup validators, certificate checks, server logs) come in for specific points.
| Tool | What it covers | Blocks |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Indexing, CWV, security, penalties | 1-4, 8, 11, 23-24 |
| PageSpeed Insights | Speed and its causes | 8-10 |
| Screaming Frog | Full crawl: codes, canonical, duplicates | 5-7, 13-22 |
| Serpstat Audit | Cloud crawl with priorities | All, focus on 13-22 |
At Query we run a site through both Screaming Frog and Serpstat: the first gives the complete raw picture, the second one already sorted by category and convenient for the client report. For small sites one of them is enough.
Nobody implements a 40-page audit where everything is "important". We split the findings into three levels using a single question: what happens if this is not fixed.
| Level | Criterion | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Pages not indexed, traffic dropping now | This week |
| Important | Indexed, but rated worse than it could be | Within a month |
| Nice to have | Better crawling, cumulative effect | On schedule |
A practical rule: prioritise errors that affect a template, not a single page. One broken canonical in the category template is worse than a hundred broken links in old news posts.
For a service website of 50-200 pages a technical audit takes one or two days: crawl, analysis, write-up. For an online store with tens of thousands of pages it takes three to five days, because filters, pagination, faceted navigation and language versions come into play. Fixing usually takes two to three times longer than the audit itself and depends on the developer and the CMS.
What the owner should receive is not a 60-page PDF full of screenshots but three things: a list of findings with a priority level, a technical brief for the developer with example URLs, and a list of what to verify after implementation. A quick snapshot of the most visible problems is available as a free SEO audit, while a full pass over all 25 points with a brief and implementation control is a detailed website audit, which we deliver end to end.
A technical audit is not a one-off event. After every release, redesign or migration some of the points break again, so a short pass through this checklist once a quarter is cheaper than hunting for the reasons traffic dropped by a third.
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