Technical SEO audit checklist
Crawl, indexation, speed, and metadata diagnosed on your live URLs — findings ranked by the traffic they put at risk.
- Google Search Console
- PageSpeed Insights
- Sanity / CMS
- Slack
- Linear
Run a technical SEO audit on metaflow.life. Focus on indexation and Core Web Vitals, and rank findings by impressions at risk.
- Pulled Search Console coverage1,284 URLs indexed, 96 excluded — 41 flagged "crawled, not indexed"
- Crawled site and reconciled URL setsFound 18 sitemap URLs unreachable from internal links
- Checked canonical and robots directives12 blog URLs canonicalize to a paginated archive
- Scored Core Web Vitals by templateBlog template fails LCP at 3.4s; hero image not preloaded
- Ranked findings by impressions at risk3 critical, 7 high, 11 medium — 4,100 monthly impressions exposed
Three critical issues account for most of the exposure: the blog canonical chain, 18 orphaned sitemap URLs, and an unpreloaded LCP image on the blog template. Fixing the canonical tag alone recovers 12 pages with existing impressions.
This technical SEO audit checklist runs as an agent workflow rather than a document you work through by hand. It crawls the site, cross-references what Google actually indexed, and returns each failure with the affected URLs, the likely cause, and the fix — so the first hour goes to decisions instead of data collection.
What is a technical SEO audit checklist?
It is the ordered set of machine-side checks that decide whether your content can be found, fetched, and indexed at all: robots and sitemap correctness, crawl paths, canonical and duplicate handling, status codes, rendering, page speed, and metadata integrity. Everything else in SEO depends on these passing first.
Diagnose crawl and indexation
- Reconcile sitemap, crawl, and indexed URL sets to surface gaps
- Flag noindex, canonical, and robots directives that contradict each other
- Trace redirect chains and loops back to the linking source
- Identify soft 404s and thin templates that dilute crawl paths
Score rendering and Core Web Vitals
- Compare field and lab metrics per page template, not per URL
- Attribute LCP failures to the specific blocking resource
- Check whether primary content renders without JavaScript
Verify metadata integrity at scale
- Find missing, duplicated, or truncated titles and descriptions
- Check heading hierarchy for skipped or duplicated levels
- Confirm canonical, hreflang, and pagination signals agree
How does the audit find indexation issues?
It compares three sets — the URLs in your sitemaps, the URLs a crawl can reach, and the URLs Google reports as indexed. Anything in one set but not another is an indexation issue, and the report names which of the three lists each URL is missing from.
When does crawl budget actually matter?
Below roughly ten thousand URLs it rarely limits anything, so the audit only raises crawl budget when it finds real waste: faceted parameter explosions, infinite calendars, redirect chains, or large blocks of soft 404s consuming fetches that should reach your money pages.
What does the technical SEO audit template check for Core Web Vitals?
Field data first, because that is what Google scores, then the lab diagnosis that explains it. The audit flags which templates fail LCP, CLS, or INP thresholds and attributes the cause to a specific render-blocking resource, unsized element, or long task.
How often should you run a technical SEO audit?
A full pass quarterly, plus a lightweight indexation and status-code check after every release or migration. Because the agent handles the data gathering, the post-release check takes minutes and catches the regressions that otherwise surface a month later as lost traffic.
How the technical SEO audit template works across your stack
The agent reads your site the way a crawler does and cross-checks against Google Search Console for impressions, coverage, and Core Web Vitals field data. PageSpeed Insights supplies lab diagnostics, and your CMS or repository provides the template context that turns a list of URLs into a list of fixes. Findings land in the run output and can be pushed to Slack, Linear, or a shared doc for whoever owns the fix.
- Google Search Console
- PageSpeed Insights
- Sanity / CMS
- Slack
- Linear
Who uses this technical SEO audit checklist
- In-house SEO leads
- Run it after every release to catch indexation regressions before they cost traffic.
- Agencies during onboarding
- Produce a defensible baseline in the first week instead of the third.
- GTM engineers
- Get technical findings scoped tightly enough to turn into tickets without a translation meeting.
- Founders without an SEO hire
- Learn which of the twenty things you read about actually applies to your site.
How to run this technical SEO audit checklist in Metaflow
Connect Search Console and name the domain
Point the agent at the property and, if you only want part of the site audited, the path prefix to scope the crawl.
Set severity thresholds
Decide what counts as urgent — for most teams that is anything blocking indexation of a page with existing impressions.
Let the agent crawl and reconcile
It fetches URLs, pulls coverage and field data, and groups failures by template rather than listing thousands of individual URLs.
Review findings ranked by traffic at risk
Each item arrives with affected URLs, evidence, likely cause, and a proposed fix you can approve or reject.
Ship fixes and re-run the affected checks
Re-run scoped to the fixed template to confirm the issue cleared rather than auditing the whole site again.
What you provide
- Domain or path prefix to audit
- Search Console access
- Optional: CMS or repo context for template names
What you get back
- Prioritized findings with affected URL lists
- Root-cause note and proposed fix per finding
- Indexation gap summary across sitemap, crawl, and index
- Core Web Vitals failures grouped by template
Why use this technical SEO audit checklist?
Findings cite your URLs and your Search Console data, not generic best practice
Issues are grouped by page template, so one fix closes hundreds of URLs
Severity is ranked by impressions at risk instead of an arbitrary score
Re-runs are scoped, which makes verification cheap enough to actually do
Technical SEO audit checklist FAQs
What is included in a technical SEO audit?
Crawlability and robots directives, indexation coverage, status codes and redirects, canonical and duplicate handling, rendering, page speed, structured data validity, and metadata integrity. Content quality and link building are separate audits — keeping them apart is what makes each report short enough to act on.
Can ChatGPT do a technical SEO audit?
It can describe what to check but cannot crawl your site or read your coverage reports, so its output is advice rather than diagnosis. This template runs inside an agent with crawl and Search Console access, which is the difference between "check your canonicals" and "these 41 URLs canonicalize to a noindexed page."
How long does the audit take to run?
Minutes for a small site, longer for large crawls, and you get the report in one pass rather than assembling exports from three tools.
Does it replace Screaming Frog or Sitebulb?
It consumes the same class of crawl data and adds the interpretation layer those tools leave to you — which findings matter, why, and in what order. Many teams keep a crawler for deep ad-hoc inspection and use this template for the recurring pass.
Will it change anything on my site?
No. This template only diagnoses and proposes. Any fix ships through your normal deploy or CMS workflow after you approve it.
Similar SEO templates
Key takeaways
- Technical fixes gate everything else — run this before commissioning content
- Group findings by template to convert one fix into hundreds of URLs
- Re-run scoped checks after each release; regressions are the real cost