A technical SEO audit sounds like something you hire a specialist for. The core of it isn't — it's a checklist of the things search engines need before a page can rank at all. These are the roots of your site, and most of the wins come from finding the few that are broken. Here's a technical SEO audit checklist you can actually run yourself.
This is the technical (roots) layer; the on-page (trunk) layer is its own audit — see the on-page SEO audit checklist.
1. Crawlability — can search engines reach your pages?
- Every important page is linked to from somewhere (no orphan pages).
robots.txtisn't accidentally blocking pages you want indexed.- No broken links or long redirect chains wasting crawl effort.
- A sitemap lists your real, indexable pages.
(Background: Crawlability and indexation.)
2. Indexation — are your pages allowed to appear?
- No stray
noindextags on pages you want in search (a very common leftover). - Pages you don't want indexed (thank-you, admin) correctly excluded.
- Check coverage in Google Search Console for pages dropped or excluded.
3. Canonicals — are signals consolidated correctly?
- Each page has one clear canonical URL.
- Canonicals point to the page that actually loads, not a slightly different URL.
- No page accidentally canonicalizing to an unrelated page.
4. Speed & rendering — is content present and fast enough?
- Pages load reasonably fast on a real mobile connection.
- Content is in the HTML, not only injected after heavy JavaScript (or crawlers may miss it).
- No render-blocking issues hiding your main content.
5. Structured data — do engines understand the page?
- The right schema type for each page type (Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article…).
- Schema is valid and matches the visible content.
6. Mobile & basics
- The site works and reads well on mobile (Google indexes mobile-first).
- HTTPS is enabled site-wide.
How to run it without the manual grind
Working through this by hand across a whole site is tedious and easy to get wrong — a single
missed noindex can hide a key page. This is exactly what CommandSEO automates: it runs these
technical checks across every page, flags issues by severity, and verifies fixes on the live
page. See what it checks, the page-type checklists, or learn each item
in the glossary. For larger sites (especially e-commerce), crawl budget
matters too — see SEO for e-commerce. On WordPress? The
platform has its own traps — see WordPress SEO: what actually matters.
A technical SEO audit is mostly a checklist. Find the few broken roots, fix them, verify they're live — and the rest of your SEO finally has a chance.