Technical SEO audit: a checklist you can work through yourself

1. Indexing: are the right pages in the index?

Open the Pages report in Search Console. What matters is not the total count but whether your service pages appear under Indexed.

• ›Test key pages one by one with URL Inspection: indexed, correct canonical?
• ›No noindex on pages that should rank, often a leftover from staging.
• ›robots.txt does not block important sections, CSS or scripts.
• ›Sitemap submitted, status Success, containing only indexable final URLs.

2. URLs: redirects, duplicates, errors

Every page should have exactly one address. Check that http to https, with and without www, and with and without a trailing slash all redirect to the same final URL in one hop, without chains.

Look for pages that return 404 but are still linked internally, and for parameter URLs reported as duplicates. On multilingual sites, each language version must reference the others with hreflang, reciprocally.

3. Page speed and mobile experience

Google assesses user experience with Core Web Vitals. Good means Largest Contentful Paint up to 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint up to 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift up to 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. Search Console shows the status under Core Web Vitals once there is enough data.

Typical causes of poor scores are large uncompressed images, too many third-party scripts, and fonts or banners that shift the layout after loading.

4. Content Google can understand

Finally, check that every important page signals its topic clearly.

• ›A unique title and description per page, no duplicates.
• ›One H1 that names the service and, where relevant, the location.
• ›Structured data for organisation, services and FAQ, with no errors in the report.
• ›Internal links: every important page is linked from at least one other page.