Before we write a single blog post or build a single link, every new client goes through the same technical SEO audit. Content and authority-building can't compensate for a site search engines struggle to crawl, understand or trust — so this is always step one.
Why we start here, every time
We've seen plenty of well-written content sit invisible in search results because of a fixable technical issue — an accidental noindex tag, a broken canonical structure, a Core Web Vitals score bad enough to suppress rankings. A technical audit finds these before they quietly cap the return on everything else you invest in.
Crawlability & indexation
We start by confirming search engines can actually find and index your important pages:
- Review of robots.txt for accidental blocks
- XML sitemap accuracy and submission status
- Crawl budget analysis for larger sites (10,000+ pages)
- Orphaned page identification
- Canonical tag audit for duplicate content issues
- Index coverage report review in Google Search Console
Site speed & Core Web Vitals
Page experience signals directly affect both rankings and conversion rate:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) scores
- Image optimization and next-gen format usage
- Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS review
- Server response time (TTFB)
- Third-party script audit — often the single biggest speed offender
Third-party scripts — chat widgets, marketing pixels, A/B testing tools — are frequently the single largest contributor to slow load times, and they're rarely audited after initial installation.
Site architecture & internal linking
How your site is structured affects how search engines distribute ranking signal across it:
- URL structure consistency and logic
- Click-depth analysis — how many clicks from the homepage to key pages
- Internal linking distribution toward priority pages
- Breadcrumb implementation
- Pagination and faceted navigation handling
Structured data & schema
Structured data helps search engines — and increasingly, AI systems — understand your content with more confidence:
- Organization and website schema
- Product, Article, FAQ, HowTo or LocalBusiness schema as relevant
- Breadcrumb schema
- Validation against Google's Rich Results Test
Mobile usability & security
Baseline trust and usability signals we confirm on every audit:
- Mobile responsiveness across common breakpoints
- HTTPS implementation and mixed content issues
- Tap target sizing and mobile navigation usability
- Accessibility basics (alt text, heading structure, color contrast)
The full checklist
| Area | What we check | Typical fix effort |
|---|---|---|
| Crawlability | Robots.txt, sitemap, index coverage | Low |
| Core Web Vitals | LCP, INP, CLS, third-party scripts | Medium–High |
| Architecture | URL structure, click depth, internal links | Medium |
| Structured data | Schema coverage and validation | Low–Medium |
| Mobile & security | Responsiveness, HTTPS, accessibility | Low–Medium |
Most of these fixes are one-time engineering work rather than ongoing effort — which is exactly why we front-load them. Get the technical foundation right once, and every content and link-building dollar after that works harder.