Technical SEO Audit Checklist

How to Run a Technical SEO Audit explains the reasoning behind the five-area framework and why the order matters. This is the checklist version: the boxes you actually check during the two focused days of a quarterly audit, organized so you're not flipping between a PDF and five different tools trying to remember what you already covered.

Run the sections in order. There's no point checking Core Web Vitals on pages Google can't crawl, and no point auditing schema on pages that aren't indexed.

Pre-Audit Setup

Confirm access to Google Search Console (owner or full user)
Confirm access to a crawler (Screaming Frog or Sitebulb) with a license that supports JavaScript rendering
Pull two weeks of server logs filtered to known Googlebot user agents
Note the current site:yourdomain.com count in Google as a sanity-check baseline
Confirm your top 10 revenue-driving URL templates (homepage, category, product, pricing, blog post) for CWV sampling

1. Crawlability

2. Index Coverage

Open GSC Pages report, filter to "Not indexed," read every status reason
Separate "Discovered, currently not indexed" (crawl priority issue) from "Crawled, currently not indexed" (content quality issue)
Grep the codebase for noindex and confirm it's only on pages that should have it
Check for canonical mismatches (page A points to B, page B points to A)
Confirm every page canonicalizes to itself unless there's a deliberate consolidation reason
Confirm parameterized URLs (UTM, session, sort, filter) canonicalize to the clean base URL
If multi-language, check GSC's International Targeting report for hreflang return-tag errors
Compare site: count against GSC indexed count; investigate if the gap exceeds roughly 20%

3. Architecture and Internal Linking

Run crawl depth report; flag pages at depth 6 or deeper from the homepage
Confirm your highest-revenue pages sit at depth 3 or shallower
Run an orphan page report (zero internal inbound links)
Decide for each orphan: link it from a relevant hub, or noindex it
Run internal link count per URL; identify the long tail of pages with 0-2 internal links
Confirm hub-and-spoke linking exists between pillar pages and their cluster articles
Classify faceted nav filters: content-changing (indexable), sort/paginate (noindex or canonical), or combination (blocked/AJAX)
Confirm every content page has a visible breadcrumb marked up with BreadcrumbList schema

4. Core Web Vitals

Test on your top 10 templates, not individual URLs, and always check field data over lab data.

Metric	Good	Needs Improvement	Poor
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)	< 2.5s	2.5s to 4.0s	> 4.0s
INP (Interaction to Next Paint)	< 200ms	200ms to 500ms	> 500ms
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)	< 0.1	0.1 to 0.25	> 0.25

These are Google's own published thresholds for a "good" Core Web Vitals score, confirmed on web.dev. Field data (CrUX, the real-user numbers in PageSpeed Insights and GSC) is what matters for ranking; lab data is only useful for diagnosis.

Pull field data (CrUX) for each top-10 template from PageSpeed Insights or GSC's Core Web Vitals report
Flag any template scoring "Needs Improvement" or "Poor" on any metric
For failing LCP: check hero image format/compression, CDN caching, fetchpriority/preload on the LCP element, critical CSS inlining, server TTFB
For failing INP: check JS bundle splitting, heavy event handlers, main-thread-blocking work, unnecessary third-party scripts
For failing CLS: check explicit width/height on images and video, reserved space for ads/embeds, font-display: swap
Re-test after each fix ships and log the before/after field data

5. Structured Data

Confirm Articles/BlogPosting schema on content pages
Confirm Product schema with Offer on product pages
Confirm FAQPage schema on pages with genuine FAQ content
Confirm Organization schema on homepage and footer
Confirm BreadcrumbList schema on every page
Confirm HowTo schema where applicable
Run Screaming Frog's structured data extraction and filter to errors or missing types
Cross-reference findings against GSC's Rich Results report
For any FAQ content, confirm the schema is clean and valid, since AI answer engines lean on it heavily when deciding what to cite

JS Rendering Check (SPA and Framework Sites)

Crawl with JavaScript rendering OFF; check if pages return 200 with an empty <body>
Crawl the same pages with JavaScript rendering ON; confirm content appears
If content never appears even with rendering on, escalate as a hydration or auth-wall bug, not a wait-it-out issue
For news/trending content, confirm SSR or SSG is in place (a delayed second-pass render kills timely rankings)
For large catalogs, confirm crawl budget isn't being burned on the render queue
Ask engineering to log the User-Agent on render failures if Googlebot render issues are suspected

Packaging the Findings

Categorize every finding as P0 (indexing-blocking), P1 (CWV/architecture), or P2 (schema/hreflang/polish)
Write each ticket with: title, URL pattern, repro steps, evidence, estimated traffic impact, and acceptance criteria
Attach GSC or crawler screenshots as evidence, not just a description
Route P0s into the next sprint planning session directly, don't let them sit in a backlog
Confirm the audit deliverable is a ticket queue, not just a findings deck

See How to Run a Technical SEO Audit for the full ticket template and the reasoning behind the P0/P1/P2 split, and SEO Specialist Tools and Tech Stack for what each crawler and monitoring tool is actually good at.

Ongoing Cadence Checklist

Print this part and pin it. A technical audit is an operating cadence, not a once-a-year event.

Weekly: check GSC Core Web Vitals report for any template that flipped from Good to Needs Improvement
Monthly: open GSC Pages report on the first Monday, compare "Not indexed" categories against last month, investigate anything up more than 10%
Quarterly: run the full five-area audit end to end, sample two weeks of server logs
Quarterly (500K+ URLs): run monthly server log sampling instead of quarterly

Catching a Core Web Vitals regression within a week is a one-hour fix. Catching it two months after a release is a multi-sprint excavation. The checklist only pays off if it's actually run on this cadence, not filed away after the first quarterly pass.

This checklist supports the work described in the SEO Specialist job description, and complements Keyword Strategy: Ranking Opportunities Competitors Missed and On-Page and Content Optimization for the content side of the same rankings problem. If you're newer to the role, Your First 30/60/90 Days as a New SEO Specialist walks through when to run your first audit relative to everything else on your plate, and Common SEO Specialist Pitfalls covers what happens when audits get skipped for too many quarters in a row.

SEO Specialist Guide