Technical SEO Audit services

A technical SEO audit is not a generic crawl export with red and green cells. It is a diagnosis of whether Google, Bing and AI retrieval systems can reach the right pages, understand the right canonical version, and trust the templates enough to rank or cite them.

The output is a fix order, not a scare list. A technical audit only earns its keep if it tells you what to fix first.

The sequence is deliberately boring because technical SEO fails when people jump straight to tools without asking what the business needs indexed.

1. Scope and access. I confirm the site stack, markets, known migrations, important templates and available data sources: Search Console, analytics, CMS access, log files if available.
2. Primary crawl. I crawl the site the way a search engine would, then compare discovered URLs against sitemap, indexed samples and internal links.
3. Indexation review. Canonicals, noindex rules, redirects, parameter URLs and duplicate content are checked against the intended URL set.
4. Template and rendering review. I inspect representative pages by template, not only individual URLs, because one broken template can affect thousands of pages.
5. Schema and entity review. Structured data is validated against visible copy and brand/entity facts so it supports trust rather than creating contradictions.
6. Prioritization. Findings are ranked by impact, effort and dependency. A blocked canonical issue comes before a cosmetic schema warning.

If a site is also targeting AI search, I add crawler access and extractability checks: whether GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and similar agents can fetch clean HTML and whether the important answer blocks are visible without interaction.

These services overlap, but they solve different problems. The audit is the diagnostic layer. Consulting turns the diagnosis into a roadmap and ongoing decisions. AI SEO builds the answer-engine and generative-search layer on top of a site that search systems can already parse.

For most sites, the technical audit comes first because it establishes whether the rest of the work has a clean foundation. If the audit finds only minor issues, the next step may be content, links or GEO. If it finds indexation debt, fixing that comes before publishing more pages.

The exact bugs change by stack, but the patterns repeat across audits.

• Canonical confusion. Multiple URL versions exist and Google chooses the wrong one.
• Parameter bloat. Tracking, filters or sorting paths create duplicate crawl targets.
• Template-wide schema errors. FAQ, Article or Service markup is valid JSON but does not match the visible page.
• Orphan commercial pages. Important service pages exist but are not linked from strong hubs.
• Slow first response. TTFB and heavy rendering make otherwise good pages feel weak before content loads.
• Blocked AI crawlers. Security or bot rules accidentally block the very agents the brand wants to be cited by.
• Migration leftovers. Old redirects, sitemap URLs and canonical tags point in different directions.

The audit separates real blockers from tool noise. A missing optional schema field and a canonical loop are not the same class of problem.

A useful SEO audit has to survive handoff. I write findings so a developer can reproduce the issue and a founder can understand why it matters.

• Issue summary. What is wrong and how serious it is.
• Evidence. Example URLs, screenshots or crawl exports where useful.
• Affected pattern. Whether the problem is one URL, one template or the whole site.
• Recommended fix. Clear implementation guidance, not just a tool warning.
• Priority. Impact, effort and dependency so the team does not waste sprint time.
• QA check. How to confirm the fix after deployment.

For teams without a developer, I can separate fixes into CMS-level tasks, lightweight markup edits and changes that genuinely need engineering time. That keeps the audit actionable instead of becoming a 90-page document nobody opens twice.

A technical audit is not judged by the number of issues found. It is judged by whether the right pages become crawlable, indexable, faster, more internally supported and easier for search systems to understand.

After fixes, I usually check: indexed canonical URL count, crawl errors and excluded pages in Search Console, sitemap coverage, Core Web Vitals trends, internal-link depth, schema validation, organic impressions on affected templates, and whether AI crawlers can fetch the relevant pages. For AI search projects, the same technical baseline feeds citation monitoring in ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews.

The report is written with caveats. A technical fix can unlock growth, but it does not guarantee rankings by itself. If competitors have stronger content, links and brand demand, technical SEO removes the brake; it does not replace the engine.