Technical SEO Audits
A technical SEO audit answers a simple question: can search engines find, render and index the pages that matter, and what is stopping them? I crawl the site, diagnose the causes and hand your developers a ranked list of fixes with acceptance criteria.
A technical SEO audit looks past the words on the page to the machinery underneath. I crawl the site the way a search engine does, then compare what the crawler finds with what analytics and index coverage data say is ranking and earning traffic. The gaps point to the problems: pages blocked by robots.txt rules or noindex tags, redirect chains, duplicate URLs without canonicals, templates that only render content in JavaScript, slow pages and sitemaps that list the wrong things. Each finding is documented with affected URLs, cause and fix.
I approach the audit as a requirements exercise, not a report. At UnitedHealth Group I owned the website roadmap and translated projects into requirements for development teams. At Polaris I authored requirements and design briefs for developers. A technical audit is the same discipline pointed at search. Every issue becomes a ticket with the affected templates, the expected behavior and the acceptance criteria. Priority follows how many pages the issue touches and how much organic traffic rides on them.
The audit is only useful if the fixes ship, so I work inside your delivery process rather than beside it. I walk the development team through the findings, answer the questions that come up when a ticket meets a real codebase, and help your product owner slot the work into the backlog. When fixes go live I test them in staging and production, confirm the crawler sees the change and close the loop in the tracking sheet. Nothing is marked done because a ticket was closed.
What a technical audit includes
Crawl and Index Report
A full-site crawl reconciled against analytics and index coverage data, showing which URLs are crawlable, indexable, canonical and earning traffic, and which are orphaned, blocked, redirected or duplicated.
Site Architecture Review
A map of how link equity flows through navigation, internal links, pagination and faceted URLs, with recommendations for crawl depth, URL structure and the parameters that should be blocked or consolidated.
Template and Rendering Findings
Page-template checks for canonical tags, meta robots directives, hreflang, structured data validity and JavaScript rendering, written per template so a fix corrects every page built from it.
Page Speed Assessment
Load time, interactivity and layout stability measured on the templates that carry the most organic traffic, with the causes traced to specific scripts, images, fonts or server response times.
Redirect and Status Map
An inventory of the redirect chains, loops, soft error pages and broken links found in the crawl, with the corrected destination for each and the rules a developer needs to implement them.
Prioritized Fix Backlog
Every finding written as a developer-ready ticket with affected URLs, expected behavior, acceptance criteria and a priority based on page count and organic traffic at stake, ready to import into your tracker.
How I run the audit
Scope and access
I confirm with you which sections of the site matter most and what a successful audit changes. I collect analytics access, crawl permissions, the CMS and hosting setup, and any recent migrations or redesigns.
Crawl and diagnose
I crawl the site, pull index coverage and analytics data, and reconcile the sources. Every discrepancy is traced to a root cause in a template, a server rule or a CMS setting.
Write the tickets
Findings become tickets with affected URLs, expected behavior and acceptance criteria, ranked by pages affected and traffic at stake. I review them with your developers before anything enters the backlog.
Verify and recrawl
As fixes deploy I test them in staging and production, recrawl the affected sections and confirm indexing follows. The tracking sheet closes only when the crawler agrees the problem is gone.
Where this comes from
My SEO roots are hands-on. I ran on-page SEO, CMS publishing and website administration for subscription web communities at TN Marketing. At UnitedHealth Group I owned the website roadmap, translated prioritized projects into requirements for development teams and saw them through user acceptance testing. At Polaris I authored requirements and design briefs for developers on consumer-facing web properties. Technical audits sit where those skills meet: reading a site the way a crawler does, then writing the fix the way a developer needs it.
See my experienceBrittany has an incredible knowledge of SEM and SEO strategy, best practices and campaign management. She is extremely dedicated to her clients' accounts, ensuring that paid search campaigns are always performing optimally, through continual optimization efforts and management. She is also committed to sharing her knowledge with team members and enjoys training and mentoring others. Aside from her vast knowledge and experience, she is a delight to work with!
Founder and CEO, Limon Marketing, formerly Target
Worked on the same team
Frequently asked
How is a technical SEO audit different from a general SEO audit?
A technical audit covers only the infrastructure: crawling, indexing, rendering, site architecture, redirects, speed and structured data. It does not assess keyword targeting or content quality, which I handle in separate engagements. The output is a developer backlog rather than a content plan, so it suits teams whose content is sound but whose site is not being crawled or indexed as it should.
Do you need access to our CMS and servers?
No, neither is required to start. I need read access to analytics and index coverage data, plus permission to crawl the site. CMS access helps me confirm how templates and settings produce what the crawler sees, and server logs are useful when crawl budget is the question. I never need deploy rights, since your developers ship the fixes.
Can you audit a site before a migration or replatform?
Yes, and that is the best time to do it. A pre-migration audit documents every URL that earns traffic, the redirect map needed to preserve it, and the template behaviors the new platform must replicate. After launch I recrawl and compare against that baseline so regressions are caught in days rather than discovered in a quarterly traffic review.
Will you implement the fixes yourself?
Usually not. Your developers implement the fixes and I make sure they have what they need. Each ticket includes the affected URLs, the expected behavior and acceptance criteria, and I stay available to answer questions during estimation and build. Once a fix deploys I test it, recrawl the affected pages and confirm the search engines pick up the change.
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