Guide
Technical SEO Audit Guide
A complete method for a technical SEO audit: set scope, collect URLs, check status codes, redirects and indexability, review metadata and internal links, then fix by template and verify.
A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can find, crawl and understand your pages. It’s less about clever tactics than about removing obstacles: errors, wasteful redirects, blocked pages and important content that nothing links to.
This guide works for a small business site or one section of a large one. The tools mentioned are MemonaIQ’s, but the method works with any crawler and link checker.
1. Decide what the audit is for
Write down why you’re auditing: a traffic drop, a redesign, a migration, or a routine review. The reason decides where to look first. A traffic drop starts with the pages that lost visits; a migration starts with the old URLs.
List the sections of the site and who owns each. Findings are only useful if they reach someone who can change the template or setting behind them.
2. Collect the URLs that matter
Use three sources and compare them. A crawl shows what is reachable by links. Your XML sitemap shows what you’ve told search engines exists. Analytics and search console data show which pages actually get visits. Pages that appear in one source but not the others are often where problems hide.
- In the sitemap but not found by the crawl: poorly linked or orphaned
- Found by the crawl but not in the sitemap: possibly pages you didn’t mean to publish
- Getting visits but erroring: urgent
3. Check status codes and redirects
Every important page should return 200 directly. Run the full URL list through a bulk checker and sort by final status and number of redirect hops. Pages returning 404 or 5xx need fixing or redirecting; redirects that take more than one hop should point straight at the final URL; temporary redirects on permanent moves should become 301s.
4. Confirm pages can be indexed
A page can return 200 and still be excluded: a noindex tag, a robots.txt rule, or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere. Check these on templates rather than individual pages. A single wrong setting in a template can remove a whole section from search.
5. Review titles, descriptions and internal links
Every indexable page needs a unique, descriptive title and a meta description that would make someone click. Duplicates usually point to a template that fills them in the same way everywhere.
Then look at how pages are linked. Important pages should be reachable within a few clicks of the homepage and linked from related content, not only from navigation menus.
6. Prioritize, fix and verify
Group findings by template and by the traffic they affect, then fix the causes in that order. After each change goes live, run the same crawl and URL checks again. A fix isn’t done until the re-check confirms it, and caches, CDNs and DNS can delay changes longer than you expect.