What we typically find on day one with a new client
A client calls us. Their organic traffic has dropped 30% since their website redesign. The site looks great. The content is solid. Pages load correctly.
We open Google Search Console. In less than five minutes, the issue is obvious: 47 high-value pages have been excluded from Google’s index. A noindex directive added during the site migration was never removed after launch.
Weeks of content creation. Countless SEO efforts. And a large portion of that content simply couldn’t appear in Google’s search results.
It’s one of the most common issues we encounter at Hamak. And it’s exactly why a technical SEO audit exists: not to generate a list of 300 errors, but to identify what’s actually holding back your organic visibility and determine which fixes will have the greatest impact.
If you’d like to first understand what technical SEO is and how it fits into an overall SEO strategy, read our article on the The 3 pillars of SEO: technical, content, popularity. This article is for those who are ready to take action.
Why Conduct a Technical SEO Audit and Why Now?
Most technical SEO issues are invisible to the naked eye. The website works. Pages load properly. Everything appears to be running smoothly.
But behind the scenes, you may be facing issues such as:
- Important pages aren’t being indexed by Google.
- Errors have quietly accumulated after a website update or redesign.
- Poor mobile performance is hurting the user experience without anyone realizing it.
- Misconfigured redirects are causing you to lose years of accumulated SEO authority.
A technical SEO audit isn’t just for large organizations with dedicated SEO teams. For small and medium-sized businesses, service-based websites, and e-commerce sites, it’s often where you’ll uncover the fastest, highest-impact opportunities for improvement.
A technical audit is particularly valuable:
- After a website redesign or CMS migration.
- Following an unexplained drop in organic traffic.
- Before launching a new content marketing initiative.
- When important pages aren’t appearing in Google Search.
- After adding multilingual functionality or a new section to your website.
The 6 Areas to Review in a Technical SEO Audit
A thorough technical SEO audit covers 6 key areas. Each one can hide issues that limit your search visibility, often without any visible signs on the front end of your website.
1. Crawling and indexing
This is the foundation. If Google can’t access your pages, or refuses to index them, everything else is secondary.
There are two important concepts to distinguish:
- Crawling: Google discovers a page by following links or reading your sitemap
- Indexing: Google decides to add that page to its database so it can appear in search results
A page can be crawled without being indexed. And a page can be indexed without generating traffic. These are two different problems, with two different solutions.
What we check:
- robots.txt: Is it accidentally blocking important sections?
- Noindex tags: Are they present on pages that should be indexed?
- Canonical tags: Do they point to the correct URL? A misconfigured canonical tag can make Google believe your primary page is a duplicate.
- XML sitemap: Is it up to date, complete, and submitted through Google Search Console?
- Crawl errors in Search Console: Are there pages returning errors, blocked pages, or indexing warnings?
What we often see: Noindex tags added during development (to block indexing of a site under construction) and never removed after launch. A simple mistake, but one with a major impact on visibility.
Crawl Budget: A Concept Worth Understanding
Google doesn’t crawl every website indefinitely. Instead, it allocates a limited crawl budget based on factors such as the size and popularity of your site.
If your website generates thousands of low-value pages (such as poorly configured filters, parameterized URLs, or duplicate content) Google may waste its crawl budget on those pages instead of your most important ones.
How to Optimize Your Crawl Budget
- Block URLs with no SEO value using robots.txt or noindex.
- Redirect or remove outdated pages.
- Limit the automatic generation of unnecessary URLs in your CMS or e-commerce platform.
2. Site Structure and Internal Linking
A solid architecture helps both your visitors and search engines understand your site.
It answers 3 fundamental questions:
- Which pages are the most important?
- How is your content connected?
- Can users and search engines reach a key page within three clicks, or is it buried five levels deep?
Your URLs also send important signals:
| Readable URL | Confusing URL |
|---|---|
| example.com/services/technical-seo-audit | example.com/page?id=874&cat=12 |
The first provides context before the page is even opened. The second offers little useful information to either users or search engines.
Internal linking refers to the network of links connecting your pages. It’s one of the most overlooked SEO opportunities. When an important page receives multiple relevant internal links, Google understands that it carries authority. Conversely, if a strategic page isn’t linked from anywhere else on your site, it may struggle to rank, even if the content itself is excellent.
What we check:
- Orphan pages (no internal links point to them)
- Depth of important pages (ideally reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage)
- Consistency of internal link anchor text
- Whether the main navigation logically reflects the site’s actual architecture
What we often see: Service pages with zero internal links from the blog, even though several articles cover exactly the same topic. A well-placed link can make a real difference to the target page’s ranking.
3. Performance and Core Web Vitals
Page speed isn’t just an SEO ranking factor. It’s a core part of the user experience—and a direct contributor to conversion rates.
Google measures website performance through Core Web Vitals, three metrics designed to evaluate how users actually experience your website.
| Metric | What it measures | Simple question |
|---|---|---|
| LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) | Speed of main content display | Does the page appear to load quickly? |
| INP (Interaction to Next Paint) | Responsiveness during interactions | Does the page respond quickly when someone clicks? |
| CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) | Visual stability | Do elements shift around unexpectedly? |
A button that takes three seconds to respond. A form that shifts just as someone is about to click Submit. An image that pushes the content down while it’s loading.
These aren’t just SEO issues. They create real friction that can reduce conversions.
What we check:
- Core Web Vitals scores in PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console.
- Image size and file formats (such as WebP versus JPEG).
- Server response time (TTFB).
- Third-party scripts that block page rendering.
- Fonts that are loaded inefficiently.
What we often see with SMBs: Images uploaded straight from a camera, uncompressed, sometimes 5 to 10 MB each. Once optimized, LCP can improve dramatically without touching a single line of code.
4. Mobile optimization
Google primarily uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking. This approach is known as mobile-first indexing.
In practice, this means that if your mobile site is less complete, slower, or more difficult to use than your desktop version, it’s the mobile experience that Google evaluates first.
What we check:
- Mobile usability reports in Google Search Console.
- Text readability without requiring users to zoom.
- The size and spacing of clickable elements such as buttons and links.
- Mobile navigation, including menus, forms, and calls to action.
- Content consistency between the mobile and desktop versions, since some CMS platforms unintentionally hide content on mobile.
What we often see: A mobile navigation menu that appears correctly but contains links that aren’t clickable on certain devices. The menu looks perfectly functional, yet users can’t actually navigate the site. Problems like these often go unnoticed when testing is done exclusively on a desktop computer.
5. Security and Redirects
HTTPS is now a baseline requirement for any modern website. Without a valid SSL certificate, browsers display security warnings that undermine user trust and send negative signals to Google.
Redirects are just as critical, especially after a website redesign or migration. When a page’s URL changes without a proper redirect in place, any SEO authority that page has built over time can be lost. A correctly configured 301 redirect passes most of that authority to the new URL.
What we check:
- SSL certificate validity
- Absence of mixed content (HTTPS pages loading HTTP resources)
- Missing redirects after a redesign or migration
- Redirect chains (A → B → C → D: each hop dilutes authority and slows loading)
- Redirect loops
What we often see: After a redesign, old URLs are often left without proper redirects. Pages that once attracted traffic and earned valuable backlinks suddenly return 404 errors, causing years of accumulated SEO authority to disappear almost overnight.
6. Structured data
Structured data is a type of technical markup that helps Google better understand the content of a page. It doesn’t replace high-quality content, but it provides additional context that can improve how your pages appear in search results.
Here are a few examples:
- A blog article with properly implemented Schema markup may qualify for a rich result.
- A local service page can display business information directly in Google Search.
- A FAQ page may show its questions and answers directly in the search results, without users needing to click through.
What we check:
- Whether the appropriate Schema markup is implemented for each content type (such as Article, LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Product, or BreadcrumbList…).
- Whether the markup is valid using Google’s Rich Results Test.
- Errors or warnings reported in Google Search Console.
What we often see: Structured data that has been only partially implemented, present on some pages, missing from others, or containing syntax errors that make it invalid. In these cases, Google simply ignores the markup.
How to prioritize fixes: the method we use
A technical SEO audit can uncover a long list of issues. The real value lies in knowing what to fix first.
For every issue we identify, we ask three questions:
- Does it affect a high-value page, such as a service page, a key conversion page, or one with strong traffic potential?
- Is it preventing search engines from crawling or indexing the page, or hurting conversions?
- Can fixing it deliver a measurable impact in the short term?
When the answer is yes to all three, it becomes a priority.
Prioritization Matrix
| Technical issue | Potential impact | Priority | Recommended fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strategic page marked as noindex | Page is excluded from search results | Very high | Remove the noindex directive |
| 404 errors on pages with traffic valuable backlinks | Traffic loss, diluted authority | High | Implement 301 redirects to the most relevant pages |
| Slow mobile performance | Poor user experience, higher abandonment rates, lower conversions | High | Optimize images, reduce blocking scripts |
| Incorrect canonical tag | Google may treat the wrong page as the primary version | Medium to high | Point the canonical tag to the preferred URL |
| Long redirect chains | Diluted authority, slower loading | Medium | Redirect directly to the final destination |
| Orphan pages with strategic content | Pages undervalued by Google | Medium | Add internal links from relevant pages |
| Incomplete or unsubmitted sitemap | Reduced eligibility for enhanced search results | Moderate | Update and submit in Search Console |
| Invalid structured data | Poorer content interpretation | Moderate | Fix markup for the content type |
| Heavy images on secondary pages | Reduced performance, limited impact | Low to moderate | Compress and convert to WebP |
Tools for Conducting a Technical SEO Audit
You don’t need to use every SEO tool available. What matters is understanding what each one does and when to use it.
Google Search Console: The Essential Starting Point
Free and powered by Google’s own data, Google Search Console should be the first tool you use for any technical SEO audit.
It helps you analyze:
- Indexing status (indexed, excluded, and error pages)
- Organic search performance (clicks, impressions, and rankings)
- Core Web Vitals
- Security issues
- Structured data validation
If you only use one tool, make it this one.
Tool Comparison Table
| Tool | Main use | Free? |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Indexing, performance, Core Web Vitals, errors | Yes |
| PageSpeed Insights | Per-page performance, concrete recommendations | Yes |
| Screaming Frog | Full crawl: 404s, redirects, tags, noindex | Up to 500 URLs |
| Ahrefs / Semrush | Overall audit, backlinks, rank tracking, competitors | Paid version |
What a technical SEO audit doesn’t do
This is an important distinction and one worth making clear.
A technical SEO audit:
- Identifies the technical issues limiting your organic visibility.
- Prioritizes fixes based on their potential impact.
- Creates the best possible foundation for your existing content and authority to perform.
A technical SEO audit does not:
- Replace a content strategy.
- Build your website’s authority or backlink profile.
- Guarantee a specific ranking in Google Search.
A technically sound website with mediocre content will still struggle to perform. Likewise, a website with excellent content but a weak technical foundation will also underperform, just for different reasons.
Technical SEO, content, and authority are the three pillars of SEO, and they work together. A technical audit is often the best place to start because it lays the foundation for everything else.
Conclusion
A well-run technical SEO audit isn’t a list of 300 errors to fix. It’s a strategic read of what’s actually holding back your visibility.
The most impactful issues are often simple to fix once identified: a misconfigured directive, oversized images, a missing redirect after a redesign. But they can stay invisible for months, sometimes years, if no one goes looking for them.
The goal isn’t technical perfection. It’s making sure Google can access your most important pages, understand them, index them, and that your visitors find what they’re looking for without friction.
At Hamak, we run technical SEO audits focused on the priorities that have a real impact on organic visibility and conversion. Ready to identify what’s holding your site back? Talk to our team about your website.
