Technical SEO Audit Checklist That Finds Revenue

The fastest way to waste a content budget is publishing onto a site Google can’t crawl, can’t trust, or can’t render properly. You can have the best service pages in Manchester and still lose the click to a slower, cleaner competitor because your indexation is messy, your templates bloat LCP, or your canonicals point to the wrong place.

A technical audit is how you turn SEO from guesswork into a measurable system. Not a one-off “tick box” exercise, either - it’s a repeatable checklist that protects rankings, improves conversion paths, and makes future growth cheaper.

Below is a technical SEO audit checklist built for UK businesses that want predictable leads, not vanity metrics.

Before you start: set the audit scope

A useful audit starts with boundaries. Are you reviewing the whole domain, a subfolder (like /blog/), or a recent migration? Are you focused on local service pages, ecommerce category templates, or a lead-gen brochure site?

Also decide what “success” means for this round. If the site is struggling to rank at all, indexation and crawlability come first. If you already rank but leads are flat, you’ll often find technical issues that drag down speed, UX, and conversion on high-intent landing pages.

Technical SEO audit checklist: crawl, index, and render

Crawl the site like a search engine

Start with a crawl using a desktop crawler and compare it to what Google reports in Search Console. Your goal is to identify what the site is presenting to bots versus what you think you’ve published.

Look for obvious crawl traps and budget drains: infinite URL parameters, faceted navigation that generates thousands of near-identical pages, calendars, internal search results, and endless pagination paths. For smaller sites this is annoying; for larger sites it can quietly stop important pages being discovered quickly.

If you see a lot of 3xx and 4xx URLs in internal links, fix the source links rather than relying on redirects. Redirects are fine when necessary, but chains and loops create latency and dilute crawl efficiency.

Indexation: are the right pages in Google?

Indexation is where technical SEO turns into commercial impact. If your money pages are excluded, nothing else matters.

Check Search Console’s indexing reports and spot patterns: “Crawled - currently not indexed”, “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”, “Alternate page with proper canonical tag”, and “Soft 404”. Each one points to a different cause. “Crawled - currently not indexed” can mean thin content, poor internal linking, or simply that Google isn’t convinced the page is worth keeping.

Then do a reality check: does the indexed set match what you’d want a customer to land on? If Google is indexing tag archives, internal search pages, staging folders, or parameter URLs, you’re leaking relevance.

Rendering and JavaScript: can Google see what users see?

Many modern sites depend on JavaScript frameworks, consent banners, and third-party widgets. This can be fine, but only if key content and links are reliably rendered.

Audit your top landing page templates (homepage, service, location, blog post, category/product if relevant). Make sure primary content, internal links, and structured data are present in the rendered HTML that Google sees. When critical content is injected late or blocked behind scripts, rankings can become unstable - especially for new pages.

Site architecture that supports rankings

Internal linking: measurable authority flow

Internal linking is one of the highest-leverage technical fixes because it influences discovery, indexation, and how authority flows.

Review your navigation, breadcrumbs, related content modules, and footer links. Important pages should not be three or four clicks deep if they’re meant to rank for competitive terms. At the same time, don’t over-link everything to everything - you want a clear hierarchy that matches how customers search and decide.

A practical test: can you map each core service page to supporting content that answers pre-purchase questions, and can you link those supporting pieces back with descriptive anchor text? When this is done well, rankings improve and the site converts better because users move through a decision path, not a dead end.

Cannibalisation and near-duplicates

UK service businesses often create multiple pages that target the same keyword set: “SEO Manchester”, “SEO Agency Manchester”, “Search Engine Optimisation Manchester”, plus separate blog posts and case studies all chasing the same intent. The result is cannibalisation - Google rotates URLs, rankings fluctuate, and CTR drops.

In your audit, group pages by intent, not by exact keyword. If two pages should never compete, consolidate, differentiate, or use internal linking to clarify which one is the primary.

Canonicals, pagination, and URL parameters

Canonical tags should be consistent, self-referential on indexable pages, and never point to non-equivalent URLs. Common issues include canonicals pointing to HTTP instead of HTTPS, pointing to redirected URLs, or being dynamically generated incorrectly on paginated or filtered views.

For pagination, you’re balancing crawl efficiency with discoverability. If page 2, 3, 4 of a category is valuable, it needs to be crawlable and internally linked in a way that makes sense. If it’s not valuable, don’t let it become an indexation problem.

Performance and Core Web Vitals (with a conversion lens)

Speed is not just a ranking factor - it’s a conversion factor. A slower page costs you leads even if rankings stay the same.

Measure what matters on real pages

Core Web Vitals should be reviewed at the template level, but prioritised by revenue. Start with pages that drive enquiries, calls, bookings, or product revenue.

Focus on:

• LCP: often caused by heavy hero images, sliders, or fonts loading late

• INP: commonly affected by third-party scripts, chat widgets, and complex front-end bundles

• CLS: typically driven by banners, cookie notices, and late-loading images without dimensions

The trade-off is real: removing scripts can improve performance but reduce tracking accuracy or lead capture features. The best answer is rarely “strip everything”. It’s usually “keep what drives revenue and implement it properly”.

Audit images, fonts, and third-party scripts

Check if images are appropriately sized for mobile, compressed, and served in modern formats where possible. Fonts should not block rendering, and you should be careful with multiple font families and weights.

Third-party scripts deserve ruthless scrutiny. If a script doesn’t contribute to lead generation, user support, or measurement you actually use, it’s a cost with no return. If it does contribute, load it efficiently and avoid duplicating functionality across tools.

Mobile-first and UX signals that affect rankings

Google evaluates the mobile version first. Your audit should treat mobile UX as the default, not an afterthought.

Review:

• Tap targets and menu usability

• Sticky headers that shrink usable screen space

• Intrusive interstitials (especially on arrival from search)

• Forms: too many fields will tank conversions even if rankings improve

Technical SEO and CRO overlap here. If a page ranks and gets clicks but the mobile experience is frustrating, you’ll see it in engagement and lead volume.

Structured data and SERP eligibility

Structured data won’t rescue a weak page, but it can improve visibility and CTR when the fundamentals are right.

Audit schema implementation for accuracy and consistency. For service businesses, common opportunities include Organisation, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ (where appropriate and compliant), and Breadcrumb. The key is truthfulness and alignment with on-page content. Marking up claims that aren’t present on the page is a risk, and overdoing it can look spammy.

Also check that structured data is present on the correct templates and not broken by theme updates.

Security, status codes, and “trust plumbing”

HTTPS, mixed content, and redirects

HTTPS should be universal, with one canonical host version (www or non-www) and clean redirects. Mixed content warnings (secure page loading insecure assets) are a silent trust killer and can interfere with rendering.

Status code hygiene

Review 404s and soft 404s, but don’t panic about every single one. Some 404s are normal. The ones that matter are:

• 404s that receive internal links

• 404s with backlinks

• deleted pages that used to rank or convert

Implement 301 redirects where there is a clear equivalent. If there isn’t, let it 404 and remove internal links. Redirecting everything to the homepage is rarely helpful and can create quality issues.

XML sitemaps and robots.txt: simple, but easy to get wrong

Your XML sitemap should include only canonical, indexable URLs that you actually want in search. If your sitemap contains redirected pages, parameter URLs, or non-indexable content, you’re giving Google noisy instructions.

Robots.txt should block true crawl traps (like internal search results) but should not block CSS/JS assets required for rendering. If you’ve ever “fixed” crawl budget by blocking whole directories without checking what lives there, this part of the audit can reveal why rankings dipped.

International, local, and multi-location considerations

If you have multiple locations or serve multiple areas, be careful with location pages. Thin “town name swapped” pages can get indexed, but they rarely hold position in competitive SERPs.

From a technical angle, make sure each location page has a distinct purpose in the architecture, is internally linked, and is not duplicating the same title tags and headings across dozens of URLs. If you use hreflang for different countries, validate it properly - incorrect hreflang can cause the wrong pages to rank in the wrong market.

Turning findings into an action plan

An audit is only valuable if it produces a prioritised backlog. We prioritise by impact and effort, but also by dependency. For example, there’s no point perfecting schema on pages that aren’t indexable, and there’s no point publishing ten new guides if the site has a crawl trap that buries fresh URLs.

A practical way to rank fixes:

• Revenue blockers: indexation issues on core landing pages, broken templates, severe performance failures

• Growth constraints: weak internal linking, cannibalisation, crawl inefficiencies

• Enhancers: structured data, minor speed gains, tidy-up tasks that reduce future risk

If you want an audit that is tied to leads and not just technical jargon, this is exactly the kind of work we deliver at Think SEO - with clear priorities, transparent reporting, and fixes that you can measure in Search Console and in enquiries.

A good technical SEO checklist isn’t something you run once and forget. Run it after releases, after migrations, and whenever performance dips without an obvious cause - because the best time to find a technical issue is before it costs you a month of leads.