The technical SEO audit checklist we actually hand to developers

Why most audits never get implemented

An audit is only worth what gets deployed. We have inherited plenty of 90-page documents from previous agencies — colour-coded, thorough, and completely untouched six months later. The reason is always the same: the document was written for the person who commissioned it, not for the developer who has to act on it.

So we changed the deliverable. Every finding becomes a ticket with a location, a reproduction step, an acceptance criterion and a priority. A developer should be able to pick one up without reading anything else.

Crawlability and indexation come first

Nothing else matters if Google cannot reach or store your pages. We start with a full crawl and compare it against the XML sitemap and Search Console coverage report. Three gaps show up almost every time: orphan pages with no internal links, paginated archives eating crawl budget, and staging subdomains left open to indexing.

Check that robots.txt is not blocking CSS or JS — a surprising number of WordPress installs still do, which stops Google rendering the page as users see it. Confirm canonical tags are self-referencing on canonical URLs and consistent in case and trailing slash. Then verify that every page you care about returns 200 and every page you do not returns 410 or 301, never a soft 404.

Core Web Vitals as a budget, not a score

Treat performance as a budget agreed before design starts, not a score chased after launch. Ours is typically: LCP under 2.0s on a mid-range Android over 4G, CLS under 0.05, INP under 150ms. That budget then constrains real decisions — how many webfont weights ship, whether the hero is an image or a video, how third-party tags load.

The usual culprits, in order of impact: unoptimised hero images, render-blocking third-party scripts, and layout shift from ads or late-loading webfonts. Fix the hero image first; it is often half the LCP problem on its own.

Structured data that earns something

Only mark up what can win an enhancement in the SERP. For a services business that means Organization, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList, Article on your blog, and FAQPage where the questions genuinely exist on the page. Everything else is effort without a return.

Validate in Search Console rather than the Rich Results Test alone — the live report tells you what Google actually parsed on your URLs.

What we hand over

A prioritised backlog in your tracker, an owner per ticket, and a re-crawl scheduled two weeks after deployment to confirm the fix held. If you want to see how this fits a wider engagement, our 90-day SEO roadmap covers what happens after the audit, and Core Web Vitals on WordPress goes deeper on the performance work.