Technical SEO Audit: The Full Walkthrough

Everything in this module becomes one repeatable process here. A technical audit answers four questions in strict order — the pipeline order from Lesson 1.1: Can Google find every page? Read it? Has it indexed the right versions? Does the experience pass? Free tools answer all four; this walkthrough shows you exactly where to look.

Your Toolkit (All Free)

• Google Search Console — Google’s own record of how it sees your site: the ground truth for indexing, and the tool you’ve been building fluency with all course long.
• A desktop crawler — software that crawls your site the way Googlebot does and reports every URL’s status, title, canonical, and more. Several respected crawlers offer free tiers (Screaming Frog’s free version handles up to 500 URLs — plenty for most sites; several alternatives offer similar free allowances). Any of them works for this walkthrough; the concepts are identical.
• PageSpeed Insights + your phone — covered in Lessons 4.4 and 4.5.

The audit runs in five stages:

Stage 1: The Index Reality Check (GSC, 15 minutes)

Start with the outcome, not the plumbing: how much of your site is actually indexed, and why not the rest?

1. Pages report (Indexing → Pages): the headline indexed/not-indexed split. Compare the indexed count against the pages you know you’ve published — a large mismatch in either direction is your first finding (missing pages, or junk URLs you didn’t know existed).
2. Read every “Why pages aren’t indexed” reason — by now, each one maps to a lesson:
   • “Excluded by noindex” — correct for utility pages; a crisis if your money pages appear here (Lesson 4.1).
   • “Blocked by robots.txt” — should contain only deliberate blocks (Lesson 4.1).
   • “Page with redirect” / “Not found (404)” — normal in small numbers; investigate spikes (Lesson 4.3).
   • “Duplicate…canonical” entries — your signal-consistency report (Lesson 4.3).
   • “Crawled – currently not indexed” — usually a content-quality verdict, not technical (Lesson 1.1’s selective indexing; the fix lives in Module 3, not here).
   • “Discovered – currently not indexed” — Google knows the URL but hasn’t crawled it; commonly crawl-priority or internal-linking weakness (Lesson 3.4).
3. Sitemaps report: discovered vs indexed per sitemap — your per-section health gauge from Lesson 4.2.

Stage 2: The Crawl (30 minutes)

Now see the site the way a bot does. Point the crawler at your homepage, let it finish, and work through these reports (every mainstream crawler has equivalents):

Stage 3: Directive Cross-Check (15 minutes)

The module’s central theme has been signal consistency — now verify it explicitly. Three files/systems must tell the same story:

• robots.txt (Lesson 4.1): read it fresh. Nothing blocked that the sitemap includes; CSS/JS unblocked; no leftover Disallow: /; Sitemap line present; AI-crawler rules matching your actual policy.
• Sitemap (Lesson 4.2): the one rule holds — spot-check that listed URLs are 200, indexable, canonical. Your crawler can crawl the sitemap directly in list mode and verify every entry in minutes.
• Site-wide redirects (Lesson 4.3): the four-variant test (http/https × www/non-www) — one hop to one true format.

Stage 4: Experience Spot-Check (20 minutes)

Not every page — the pages that matter: homepage, top services/products, top 3 traffic pages (GSC → Performance tells you which).

• Speed: PageSpeed Insights per key page, mobile tab, field verdict first — plus the GSC Core Web Vitals report for site-wide page groups (Lesson 4.4).
• Mobile: the parity check and real-phone test from Lesson 4.5, plus GSC URL Inspection’s rendered view on your single most important page — the literal ground truth of what Googlebot sees.

Stage 5: Prioritise — Pipeline Order, Impact First

Your findings sheet now has twenty or fifty rows. Resist fixing them top to bottom; sort by this hierarchy instead:

1. Blockers first: anything preventing crawling or indexing of pages that should rank — accidental noindex on money pages, robots.txt over-blocking, 5xx errors, important orphans. These gate everything else (the pipeline rule from Lessons 1.1 and 1.3: no later stage can compensate for an earlier failure).
2. Signal conflicts second: canonical inconsistencies, redirect chains, sitemap contradictions — Google is guessing where you should be declaring.
3. Experience third: failing mobile CWV on key pages, mobile parity gaps.
4. Hygiene last: duplicate titles on minor pages, scattered 404s, depth issues on low-priority content. Real, but never urgent.