Technical SEO Audits
Your content might be excellent, but if your website’s technical foundations are broken, Google may never show it to anyone. We find and fix the problems underneath.
What Is a Technical SEO Audit?
A technical SEO audit examines the infrastructure of your website, the code, the server configuration, the site architecture, the loading speed, the mobile experience, and the dozens of technical factors that affect how search engines crawl, index, and rank your pages.
Think of it as a building inspection for your website. The paint on the walls might look fine (your design and content), but if the foundations are cracked, the plumbing is leaking, and the wiring doesn’t meet code, the building has serious problems. A technical audit finds those problems.
Common issues we discover include slow page loading times (often caused by unoptimised images, bloated code, or poor hosting), pages that Google can’t crawl because of misconfigured robots.txt files, duplicate content created by URL parameters or pagination, missing XML sitemaps, incorrect canonical tags, broken redirects, and mobile usability failures that Google penalises in rankings.
These issues are invisible to most business owners. Your website might look perfectly fine in a browser, but behind the scenes, technical debt is quietly undermining your search visibility. The websites we audit almost always have multiple technical issues that are actively suppressing their rankings.
Why Technical SEO Matters for Your Business
Google has been clear: website experience matters for rankings. Site speed, mobile-friendliness, secure connections (HTTPS), and clean architecture are all ranking factors. If your website is slow, broken on mobile, or difficult for Google to crawl, your content and your backlinks can only do so much.
For small businesses, the most damaging technical issues are often the simplest. We’ve seen sites where a single WordPress setting, toggled during development and never switched back, told Google not to index the site at all. The business was invisible to search for months and had no idea why.
In our experience, many small business websites go years without a meaningful update. During that time, WordPress core releases dozens of updates, plugins change, PHP versions advance, and Google’s requirements shift. Without regular technical maintenance, websites accumulate problems that gradually erode their search performance.
Speed is a particularly pressing issue. Google’s research found that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if a page takes longer than three seconds to load (Google/SOASTA, “The Need for Mobile Speed,” 2017). Many websites we audit score below 65 on Google’s PageSpeed test. For a local business, every second of loading delay costs enquiries.
What's Included
- Full website crawl identifying broken links, redirect chains, orphan pages, and crawl errors
- Page speed analysis for desktop and mobile, with specific fix recommendations
- Mobile usability audit covering responsive design, tap targets, viewport configuration, and font sizing
- HTTPS and security certificate verification
- XML sitemap review and generation
- Robots.txt audit to ensure correct crawl directives
- Canonical tag and duplicate content analysis
- Structured data (schema markup) audit and implementation recommendations
- Core Web Vitals assessment: Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Interaction to Next Paint
- Server response time and hosting performance evaluation
- Image optimisation audit covering format, compression, lazy loading, and alt attributes
- Prioritised fix list ranked by impact on search visibility
Our Approach to Technical SEO
We don’t just generate an automated report and hand it over. Automated tools are part of the process, but they produce noise alongside signal. Our value is in interpreting the results, prioritising what actually matters, and doing the work to fix it.
The audit begins with a comprehensive crawl of your website using professional SEO tools. We analyse every URL, every response code, every redirect, every resource. This gives us the raw data.
From there, we assess the findings against your specific situation. A 50-page business website has different technical priorities from a 500-page e-commerce catalogue. A site on quality managed hosting has different server-side considerations from one on a shared hosting plan that costs $8 a month. We contextualise every finding.
We then produce a prioritised action plan. Critical issues that are actively blocking indexation or significantly slowing the site come first. Important improvements that will compound over time come next. Minor optimisations round out the list. You’ll know exactly what needs doing, why it matters, and in what order.
Because we build on WordPress, we have deep familiarity with the platform’s technical quirks, common plugin conflicts, theme-related performance issues, and WordPress-specific SEO configurations. Our WordPress development team handles the implementation, ensuring fixes are done properly and don’t introduce new problems.
Frequently Asked Questions
We recommend a comprehensive audit annually, with lighter quarterly checks. Major changes to your site (redesign, platform migration, large content additions) should always be followed by a technical review. Ongoing WordPress maintenance can catch many issues before they affect rankings, which is part of our security and maintenance service.
Technical SEO issues are almost always invisible to visitors. A site can look professional and work smoothly in a browser while having serious crawlability, speed, or indexation problems under the surface. The only way to know is to look. That’s what the audit does.
The audit itself is a diagnostic process, it doesn’t change anything. When it comes time to implement fixes, we work on staging environments for major changes and test thoroughly before deploying. Our approach is conservative: fix the issue, verify it works, then move to the next one.
Page speed is one component of technical SEO, but they’re not the same thing. Technical SEO also covers crawlability (can Google access your pages), indexation (does Google know about your pages), site architecture (how your pages relate to each other), and structured data (how Google understands your content). Speed matters a great deal, but it’s one piece of the puzzle.
Get Started Today
The Digital Business Snapshot includes a website performance assessment that highlights the most pressing technical issues. It’s a fast, affordable way to find out what’s happening under the surface.
Related Services
- On-Page Optimisation — Optimise the content layer once the technical foundations are solid
- WordPress Performance Optimisation — Deep speed and performance improvements
- WordPress Security and Maintenance — Ongoing technical health management
- Keyword Research — Understand which pages to prioritise in technical fixes
- SEO Services (main) — Overview of all our SEO capabilities