The 18-Point Technical SEO Audit We Run Before Any Engagement

Before we quote any engagement, we run the same eighteen-point technical pass. Here it is, so you can grade your own site first.

Crawl and Index

Robots.txt permits the right crawlers including AI agents. XML sitemap exists, is current, and is submitted. No orphaned pages. No accidental noindex tags left from staging. Canonical tags self-reference the actual page URL.

Performance

Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on throttled mobile. Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Images served as WebP with explicit dimensions. No render-blocking third-party scripts above the fold.

Structure

One H1 per page. No skipped heading levels. Descriptive, unique title tags under 60 characters. Unique meta descriptions under 155 characters. Internal links using descriptive anchor text rather than "click here."

Structured Data

LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService schema with geo coordinates and NAP. Service schema on each service page. FAQPage schema on pages with FAQs. Article schema on blog posts. All of it validating without errors.

Local Signals

Name, address, and phone consistent between the site and Google Business Profile. Embedded map or clear service-area statement. Town-specific pages with genuine local content.

Score Yourself

Fourteen or more passing means you have a solid foundation and should focus on content and authority. Under ten means technical fixes will produce faster returns than anything else you could spend on.

Next Step

Our free visibility snapshot runs all eighteen automatically against your live site and returns a prioritized fix list.