Technical SEO Audit Checklist: 25 Items to Check Quarterly

Technical SEO is the foundation that content and links are built upon. A technically broken site limits the impact of every other SEO investment. Run this audit quarterly to catch issues before they compound.

Crawlability: check robots.txt for unintended blocks. Verify XML sitemap is submitted and error-free. Check Google Search Console coverage report for crawl errors. Ensure important pages return 200 status codes.

Indexability: verify canonical tags point to the correct URLs. Check for accidental noindex tags. Ensure pagination is handled properly. Verify hreflang implementation for international sites.

Site speed: run PageSpeed Insights on key page templates. Check Core Web Vitals in Search Console. Verify image optimization — WebP or AVIF format, proper sizing, lazy loading. Check for render-blocking resources.

Mobile experience: test key pages on actual mobile devices, not just simulators. Verify tap targets are spaced adequately. Check font sizes are readable without zooming. Ensure no horizontal scrolling.

Security: verify SSL certificate is valid and not expiring soon. Check for mixed content warnings. Ensure all pages redirect HTTP to HTTPS.

Structured data: validate schema markup using Google Rich Results Test. Check for errors in existing markup. Identify opportunities for additional schema types.

Internal linking: audit for orphan pages with no internal links. Check for broken internal links. Verify important pages are reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage.