Technical SEO Audit Checklist with Auditite

Overview

A technical SEO audit is the foundation of any SEO strategy. It identifies issues that prevent search engines from properly crawling, rendering, and indexing your content. Run this checklist quarterly or before any major site change.

Crawlability

• Verify robots.txt is accessible and correctly configured
• Confirm XML sitemap exists, is valid, and is submitted to Search Console
• Check that all important pages are reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage
• Identify and fix broken internal links (404 errors)
• Resolve redirect chains (more than one hop) and redirect loops
• Verify no important pages are accidentally blocked by robots.txt
• Check server response times — all pages should respond within 2 seconds
• Identify and fix orphaned pages (pages with no internal links)

Indexability

• Verify all important pages return a 200 status code
• Check that canonical tags are correctly implemented on every page
• Confirm no important pages have noindex meta tags
• Identify duplicate title tags across the site
• Identify duplicate meta descriptions across the site
• Check for duplicate content issues (multiple URLs serving identical content)
• Verify that URL parameters are handled correctly (canonicalized or blocked)
• Compare indexed page count in Search Console against expected page count

On-Page Elements

• Verify every page has a unique, descriptive title tag under 60 characters
• Confirm every page has a unique meta description under 155 characters
• Check that every page has exactly one H1 tag
• Verify heading hierarchy is logical (H1 > H2 > H3, no skipped levels)
• Confirm all images have descriptive alt attributes
• Check that internal links use descriptive anchor text

Site Architecture

• Verify URL structure is clean, readable, and keyword-inclusive
• Check that breadcrumb navigation is implemented consistently
• Confirm pagination is handled correctly (self-canonicaling paginated pages)
• Verify site hierarchy is logical and flat (important pages are not buried)
• Check that navigation is crawlable (not dependent on JavaScript for link discovery)

HTTPS and Security

• Verify all pages are served over HTTPS
• Confirm HTTP requests redirect to HTTPS with 301 redirects
• Check SSL certificate validity and expiration date
• Verify no mixed content warnings (HTTP resources on HTTPS pages)
• Check for security headers (HSTS, X-Content-Type-Options, X-Frame-Options)

Performance

• Test Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) on representative pages
• Check total page weight — target under 2MB for most pages
• Verify images are compressed and served in modern formats
• Check for render-blocking CSS and JavaScript
• Confirm browser caching headers are set on static resources
• Test mobile page speed on throttled connections

Structured Data

• Verify structured data is implemented on all eligible page types
• Validate structured data using Google’s Rich Results Test
• Check Google Search Console’s Enhancements reports for schema errors
• Confirm structured data content matches visible page content

International (If Applicable)

• Verify hreflang tags are correctly implemented with reciprocal links
• Confirm language and region codes are valid
• Check that canonical tags are consistent with hreflang annotations
• Verify content is properly translated (not machine-translated without review)

Mobile

• Verify the site is mobile-friendly using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
• Check viewport meta tag is set correctly
• Confirm tap targets are adequately sized and spaced
• Verify content parity between mobile and desktop versions