How to Run a Technical SEO Audit: A Step-by-Step Process

A technical SEO audit is not a one-time event — it's a diagnostic protocol that should run quarterly for any site with more than 100 indexed pages. Done right, it surfaces the technical issues blocking your organic growth before they compound into traffic losses. Here's the four-phase process we run for every B2B client.

Phase 1 — Crawl Analysis

Start with a full crawl using Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or Ahrefs. You're looking for: pages that return non-200 status codes, pages blocked by robots.txt that shouldn't be, redirect chains longer than two hops, pages without canonical tags or with incorrect canonicals, and pages with duplicate or near-duplicate titles and meta descriptions.

• 4xx errors: broken pages that may have backlinks pointing to them (redirect to relevant live page)
• 5xx errors: server errors that prevent crawling (escalate to dev team immediately)
• Redirect chains: A → B → C chains leak PageRank — flatten to A → C
• Blocked pages: confirm robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking important content
• Duplicate content: find and resolve with canonical tags or 301 redirects

Phase 2 — Indexability and Canonicals

Crawlability (a bot can reach the page) and indexability (Google will include it in results) are different things. Cross-reference your crawl data with Google Search Console's Coverage report. Pages marked 'Excluded' or 'Noindexed' need investigation — some exclusions are intentional (thank-you pages, gated content), but many are accidental. Check: noindex tags, canonical mismatches, hreflang errors for multilingual sites, and orphan pages (content with no internal links pointing to it).

Phase 3 — Performance and Core Web Vitals

Use PageSpeed Insights and Chrome UX Report (CrUX) data in GSC to measure real-user Core Web Vitals. Field data from CrUX reflects how actual users experience your site — it's what Google uses for ranking. Focus on your most valuable pages first: homepage, key service pages, top blog posts. Fix LCP issues (image optimization, preloading), INP issues (reduce JavaScript blocking) and CLS issues (explicit element dimensions).

Phase 4 — Schema and Structured Data

Validate all existing schema with Google's Rich Results Test. Look for: schema that errors (invalid JSON-LD), schema that's present but not eligible for rich results (correct but incomplete), and high-value pages that have no schema at all. Priority schemas for B2B sites: Organization, WebSite, Service, FAQPage on service/product pages, Article on blog posts, and BreadcrumbList on all internal pages.