Technical SEO Audit: The 12 Checks We Run on Every New Client Site
Before we touch content or backlinks, every new client gets the same technical audit. Here's exactly what's on it, and why each item matters.
Written by
Salman Ashraf
Published on
Read time
9 min read
Content strategy and link building get all the attention, but they're wasted effort if the site underneath has crawl or indexing problems. This is the audit we run before recommending anything else.
Crawlability and indexing
We check robots.txt for accidental disallow rules, confirm the XML sitemap actually matches the live site structure, look for orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them, and review Search Console for pages excluded from the index and why.
Structure and markup
From there: heading hierarchy (one H1 per page, logical nesting beneath it), canonical tags pointing to the right URL, structured data validating without errors, and internal linking that actually routes authority toward the pages that should rank — not just the homepage.
The last section is Core Web Vitals, since page experience is now a genuine ranking factor rather than a soft signal. Every one of these checks takes minutes to run and routinely surfaces the issue that's been quietly capping a site's rankings for months.
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