Technical audit of a website for search engines
A technical audit is a full check of how search engines crawl, render and index a website. Best Boost Partners carries out the technical audit as the first part of SEO promotion, for sites that lose traffic, are preparing a redesign or have never been checked. You receive a document with every issue found, example URLs and a prioritised list of fixes written as tasks for developers.
What exactly do we check in a technical audit?
Crawl and status codes
We crawl the whole site with a crawler such as Screaming Frog and record the status code of every URL. Broken pages, redirect chains and loops, and pages that return a success code but show an error are listed together with the links that lead to them.
Indexing and crawl budget
We compare the crawled URLs with the pages in the index according to Google Search Console and with the sitemap. Server logs show which sections the search robot visits often and which it ignores. This check matters most on auto parts catalogues, stores with filters and news archives, where the robot can spend its visits on pages of no value.
Duplicates and canonicals
We find pages that open at several addresses: with and without a trailing slash, with parameters, in different letter case, with and without www. For each group we name the main address and the method: a redirect, a canonical tag or a noindex rule.
Robots.txt and sitemap
We read robots.txt rule by rule and check that the sitemap contains only indexable pages with a success code. Closed sections that should be open, and open sections that should be closed, go into the task list.
Core Web Vitals and mobile rendering
We measure loading, responsiveness and layout stability on the main page templates, and use field data where the site has enough visitors. We also check what the search robot sees after rendering on a mobile screen, because content loaded by scripts may never reach the robot.
Structured data
We compare the markup on each page type with what the page really shows: products, articles, the organisation, breadcrumbs, questions and answers. Errors and warnings from the validators are grouped by template.
What do you get after a technical audit?
- An audit document in which each issue has a description, the reason it matters, example URLs and a priority.
- A task list for developers with the expected result and a way to check each fix.
- Tables with the crawl data: status codes, redirects, duplicates, canonicals, titles and the indexing state of every URL.
- A redirect map, if the audit comes before a move to a new domain, CMS or URL structure.
- A repeat check after the fixes are released, with a list of closed tasks and tasks that remain open.
When is a technical audit needed?
- Traffic or the number of indexed pages has dropped, and Google Search Console alone does not show the cause.
- A redesign, a new CMS or a domain move is planned, and the current state has to be recorded before the change.
- The site has grown through filters, tags or archives, and new pages reach the index slowly.
- SEO promotion is about to start, and nobody has checked the technical base of the site.
Frequently asked questions
Does a technical audit change anything on the site?
A technical audit changes nothing on the site. We work with a crawler, read access to Google Search Console and copies of the server logs. Changes begin only when your developers or ours take the tasks from the audit into work.
What if the hosting does not keep server logs?
A technical audit can be done without server logs. In that case we rely on the crawl and on the crawl statistics in Google Search Console, and the audit includes a task to switch on log storage. Log analysis is added later, once enough data has been collected.
How long does a technical audit take?
The time a technical audit takes depends on the number of pages and page templates, so we name the deadline after the brief and a look at the site. After the fixes are released, first technical changes usually show in search within a few weeks.
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