The exact technical audit our engineers run before any SEO campaign starts — crawling, indexation, speed, rendering, structured data and internal linking — with what each check means, how to run it yourself, and which fixes actually move rankings.
Content work on a technically broken site is money set on fire. You can publish the best article in your sector and watch it do nothing because the page is not indexed, renders empty to a crawler, or sits forty internal clicks from the homepage. So before we write a single word for a client, we run this audit. It is twenty-one checks in six groups, and it usually takes a day. Every one of them is something you can check yourself — nothing here needs an enterprise tool.
Group one: can search engines reach you at all
Start at the front door. Check that your robots.txt does not block anything important — the classic disaster is a staging rule that shipped to production and quietly deindexed a whole section. Confirm your XML sitemap exists, is listed in robots.txt, returns real URLs rather than redirects, and is split sensibly if it is large. Verify that every page you care about returns a 200 and not a soft 404 — a page that says 'nothing found' while returning 200 is worse than a clean 404, because the engine keeps it. Finally, crawl the site and compare the number of reachable URLs against the number of pages you think you have. The gap is always informative.
Group two: indexation and duplication
Reachable is not the same as indexed. Check Search Console's coverage report for pages excluded as 'crawled, currently not indexed' — at volume, that is usually a quality or duplication signal rather than a bug. Confirm every page has a self-referencing canonical, and that it points at the version you actually want: one host, one protocol, one trailing-slash convention. Hunt for duplicate content created by faceted filters, session parameters, tag archives and print views; these multiply silently and dilute the page you wanted ranking. And check that you are not accidentally noindexing templates — pagination and category pages are the usual casualties.
Group three: speed and Core Web Vitals
Measure on a throttled mobile connection, not on your office wifi, and use field data where you have it rather than lab scores. Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds is the target, and the fix is nearly always the same three things: the hero image is too large or not preloaded, render-blocking CSS and fonts delay first paint, and third-party scripts are loaded before anything the user came for. Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds usually means breaking up long JavaScript tasks and deferring anything non-critical. Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 means giving every image, embed and ad slot explicit dimensions so nothing jumps as it loads. These are engineering fixes rather than marketing ones, which is why they so often sit undone.
Group four: rendering
This is the check that catches the most expensive problems. View the rendered HTML of your most important page as a crawler sees it — Search Console's URL inspection shows you exactly this. If your product descriptions, your headings or your internal links only appear after client-side JavaScript executes, you are gambling. Some crawlers run it; many run it late or not at all; AI engines frequently do not. Server-render anything that matters for ranking. The related check is lazy-loading: images below the fold should be lazy, but content and links should not be, because a link that only exists after a scroll event is a link the crawler never follows.
Group five: structured data and semantics
Structured data does not directly raise rankings, but it decides whether you get a rich result, and rich results decide click-through rate. Validate that your Organization markup is present site-wide and consistent, that your product, service, article and FAQ markup matches what is visibly on the page, and that breadcrumbs are marked up. One rule above all: never mark up something the user cannot see, and never publish review or rating markup you cannot evidence. Invented ratings are the fastest route to a manual action that strips rich results from the entire domain. Alongside the schema, check the plain semantics — exactly one H1 per page, a heading hierarchy that does not skip levels, descriptive alt text on meaningful images, and link text that says where it goes rather than 'click here'.
Group six: internal linking and architecture
The last group is the one most audits skip, and it is often where the biggest gains sit. Every important page should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage. Check for orphan pages that nothing links to — they exist on almost every site over a hundred pages, and they are usually the ones somebody worked hardest on. Look at your anchor text distribution: if every internal link to a page says 'read more', you have told search engines nothing about it. Make sure related pages link to each other deliberately rather than by accident. This is cheap, entirely within your control, and it compounds, which makes it the best value work in the whole list.
What to fix first when you cannot fix everything
Order matters more than completeness. Fix anything that blocks indexing first, because nothing else counts until pages are in the index. Then fix rendering, because a page that renders empty cannot be judged on its merits. Then canonicals and duplication, which quietly split the authority you already have. Then speed, which affects both ranking and conversion and tends to need real engineering time. Then schema and internal linking, which are the multipliers you apply once the foundation holds. Working in that order means every later fix lands on something that can actually benefit from it.
How often to re-run it
A full audit twice a year is sensible for most sites, and immediately after any redesign, replatform or migration — those three events cause more sudden ranking losses than anything else, almost always through a handful of avoidable technical mistakes. Between audits, watch three things weekly: Search Console coverage errors, Core Web Vitals field data, and your server error rate. If any of them move sharply, something has changed that you did not intend.
None of this is glamorous and none of it is optional. A site that passes these twenty-one checks is not guaranteed to rank, but a site that fails them is guaranteed to underperform whatever you spend on content and links. If you would rather have it done and documented than work through it yourself, our technical SEO service runs exactly this audit and hands you the findings in priority order with what each fix is worth — and if the fixes turn out to be build-level, our web development team can carry them out rather than handing you a list. You can also just send us your URL and we will tell you honestly whether you have a technical problem or a content one.
Code Craft SEO Team
Technical SEO at Code Craft — the team behind our published work and products and the 39-plugin product suite.