How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit in 5 Steps

Uncover the Blockers

A technical SEO audit is like taking your car to the mechanic. Your website might look fine on the outside, but underneath the hood, rendering scripts might be blocking Googlebot from even seeing your content.

Step 1: Crawl the Website

Use a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to crawl your entire domain. You're looking for status codes (find those 404s and 500s) and ensuring all critical pages return a 200 OK.

Step 2: Review Indexation

Open Google Search Console and navigate to the Pages report.

• Are there pages "Crawled - currently not indexed"? This indicates poor content quality.
• Are there pages "Discovered - currently not indexed"? This indicates crawl budget or server load issues.

Step 3: Canonical Tags

Ensure every single page has a self-referencing canonical tag to prevent duplicate content issues, especially for e-commerce sites with parameterized URLs.

Step 4: Examine Your XML Sitemap

Your sitemap should ONLY contain 200 OK URLs that you actually want indexed. Exclude utility pages, tag archives, or paginated series unless explicitly strategic.