Most SEO audit templates run to hundreds of line items and produce a report nobody acts on. In practice a small number of failures account for the overwhelming majority of technical problems. Start here.
1. Is it actually indexable?
Check robots.txt and every page's robots meta tag. A noindex or a Disallow: / left behind after a staging launch is the most damaging error in this list and the most common. Verify with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console rather than assuming.
2. Is one URL serving one page?
These should all resolve to a single canonical address:
http://andhttps://www.and non-www.- With and without a trailing slash
/index.phpand/
Each unresolved variant splits your link equity across duplicates. Enforce one version with 301 redirects and confirm it with self-referencing canonical tags.
3. Does every page have a unique, honest title and description?
Crawl the site and sort by title. Duplicates mean pages are competing with each other. Missing descriptions mean Google writes your snippet. Titles beyond roughly 60 characters get truncated in the results.
4. Is there exactly one H1, and does it match intent?
One H1 per page, describing what the page is actually about, using the words people search for. Headings below it should nest logically — H2 under H1, H3 under H2 — because that structure is how both crawlers and screen readers understand the page.
5. Are Core Web Vitals passing in the field?
Search Console's Core Web Vitals report, not Lighthouse. Lab scores are useful for debugging and irrelevant for ranking. Field data at the 75th percentile is what counts.
6. Is the mobile page the same page?
Indexing is mobile-first. If your mobile version hides content, drops structured data, or serves different internal links, the hidden version is the version being indexed. Compare rendered mobile and desktop HTML directly.
7. Is the internal linking doing any work?
Find orphan pages — pages with no internal links pointing at them. They are effectively invisible. Then check click depth: anything more than three clicks from the homepage is being told, structurally, that it is unimportant. Fix both with contextual links, not a bigger footer menu.
8. Does the sitemap tell the truth?
Your XML sitemap should list canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs only. No redirects, no 404s, no noindexed pages, no parameter variants. A sitemap full of noise teaches Google to discount it.
9. Are you leaking crawl budget?
Look for infinite spaces: faceted navigation generating unlimited filter combinations, calendar pages extending to the year 3000, session IDs in URLs, paginated archives with no end. On large sites this quietly consumes the crawl budget your real pages needed.
10. Is your structured data valid?
Run key templates through the Rich Results Test. Organization, Breadcrumb and Article are the baseline; Product, FAQ, LocalBusiness and Review where relevant. Invalid markup earns nothing — and markup that contradicts the visible page risks a manual action.
11. Are redirects clean?
Chains (A→B→C) waste crawl budget and dilute signals. Loops break pages entirely. Soft 404s — a "not found" message returned with a 200 status — confuse indexing badly. Crawl the whole site and flatten every chain to a single hop.
12. Is the content substantially unique?
Boilerplate location pages with a swapped city name, product pages carrying manufacturer descriptions verbatim, near-identical service pages. Near-duplicate content competes with itself. Consolidate or genuinely differentiate.
How to run it
Crawl the site with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Cross-reference against Search Console's Pages report and PageSpeed Insights field data. Then — and this is the step that gets skipped — sort every finding by the number of URLs affected and fix in that order.
One template-level fix usually resolves more URLs than a week of individual page edits.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I run a technical SEO audit?
A full audit twice a year, plus a short check after any redesign, migration or platform change. Monitor Search Console coverage continuously between audits.
What is the most common technical SEO mistake?
Accidental noindex or robots.txt blocks left over from a staging environment. It is the single most damaging and most frequently overlooked error.
