Technical SEO Audit Checklist for a Company Website

A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can find, crawl, understand and index the pages on your website. Work through it in this order: confirm crawling is allowed (robots.txt and sitemap), check which pages are actually indexed, fix broken links and redirect chains, resolve duplicate content with canonical tags, review site structure and internal links, then look at speed, mobile usability and structured data. Content and links decide how well you rank, but technical problems can stop good pages being seen at all.

This checklist is the one we use on company websites, which tend to have a few dozen to a few thousand pages. Large e-commerce sites need more, but the order is the same.

Before you start, what tools do you need?

• Search Console for your domain, verified at the domain level so it covers every subdomain and protocol.
• A crawler that walks your site like a search engine and lists every URL, status code, title and canonical tag. Several desktop crawlers do this for small sites at no cost.
• PageSpeed Insights for performance checks.
• A spreadsheet to record each issue, the affected URLs and the fix.

Crawl the whole site first and keep the export. Most of the checks below are filters on that one crawl.

Step 1: Can search engines crawl the site?

Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it.

• Make sure it does not block important sections. A leftover Disallow: / from a staging site is more common than you would think.
• Check that CSS and JavaScript files are not blocked, because search engines need them to render pages.
• Confirm it points to your sitemap with a Sitemap: line.

Then open the sitemap. It should list every page you want indexed and nothing else: no redirects, no error pages, no pages marked noindex. Submit it in Search Console and check the reported count against the number of real pages.

Step 2: Which pages are actually indexed?

The page indexing report in Search Console shows what Google has indexed and why other URLs were left out. Look for:

• Important pages marked "Crawled, currently not indexed" or "Discovered, currently not indexed". These often point to thin content, duplication or weak internal linking.
• Pages excluded by a noindex tag that should be indexed. Check templates, since a single setting can apply noindex to a whole section.
• Large numbers of indexed URLs you do not want, such as tag pages, internal search results or URLs with tracking parameters.

Step 3: Are there broken links and redirect problems?

Filter your crawl by status code.

• 4xx errors: fix internal links pointing to missing pages, and redirect removed pages that still have backlinks or traffic.
• 5xx errors: server problems, which need fixing before anything else.
• Redirect chains: A redirects to B which redirects to C. Point A straight to C.
• Redirect loops: pages that redirect back to themselves through a chain.
• Temporary redirects (302) used for permanent moves. Use 301 or 308 for permanent changes.

Also check that every version of your domain (http, https, with and without www) redirects in one step to the single version you use.

Step 4: Is duplicate content under control?

Duplicate or near-duplicate pages split ranking signals and waste crawl attention. Common sources on company sites:

• The same page reachable at several URLs, with and without trailing slashes or with tracking parameters.
• Print versions, filter combinations and paginated archives.
• Location or service pages built from the same template with only one word changed.

Each page should have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to its preferred URL. Check that canonical tags point to pages that return a 200 status, are indexable, and are not themselves redirected.

Step 5: Is the site structure clear?

Search engines understand importance partly through internal links. Check:

• Click depth. Important pages should be reachable within three clicks of the home page.
• Orphan pages. Pages in the sitemap with no internal links pointing to them. Compare the sitemap list with the crawl.
• Descriptive anchor text. "Our bookkeeping services" tells a crawler more than "click here".
• Clean, readable URLs that reflect the structure, such as /services/bookkeeping.

Step 6: Are titles, descriptions and headings in order?

From the crawl export, filter for:

• Missing, duplicate or very long title tags.
• Missing or duplicated meta descriptions.
• Pages with no H1, or several.
• Images with no alt text where the image carries meaning.

These are quick fixes with a real effect on how your pages appear in results.

Step 7: Is the site fast and usable on mobile?

Search engines index the mobile version of your pages. Check that the mobile version contains the same content as desktop, that text is readable and buttons are usable, and that Core Web Vitals pass. Our post on Core Web Vitals for business websites covers what to fix there.

Step 8: Is structured data present and valid?

Structured data (schema markup, usually in JSON-LD) helps search engines understand what a page is about. For a company website, the useful types are usually:

• Organization on the home or about page, with your name, logo, website and contact address.
• BreadcrumbList for section navigation.
• Article or BlogPosting for posts.
• FAQPage where a page genuinely contains questions and answers.

Validate it with Google's Rich Results Test and fix any errors. Only mark up content that is visible on the page.

Step 9: What else is worth checking?

• HTTPS everywhere, with no mixed-content warnings.
• Hreflang tags if you publish in more than one language, with each version pointing to all the others.
• Migration leftovers. If you have changed CMS recently, check that every old URL redirects. Our comparison of headless and traditional CMS explains why redirects are the part of a migration most often lost.

How do you prioritise the fixes?

Rank issues by how many important pages they affect and how much they block:

1. Anything stopping crawling or indexing of key pages.
2. Server errors and broken internal links.
3. Redirect chains, canonical errors and duplicates.
4. Structure and internal linking.
5. Titles, descriptions and structured data.
6. Speed and mobile improvements.

Fix, re-crawl to confirm, and repeat the audit every few months or after any large change to the site.

Working with Syntora Ai

Technical SEO and domain analysis are part of Syntora Ai's growth work, and as a web studio we can fix the problems in the code instead of only listing them. If you want an audit of your company website with the fixes done, write to hello@syntorahq.ai or see our growth and data practice.