How to Do a Technical SEO Audit (Beginner to Advanced Walkthrough)

You’ve optimized your content, built links… but something’s still off and your website doesn’t rank the way you expected? Broken links, indexing errors, and other hidden technical SEO issues can be silently killing your performance. What's the fix? A deep technical SEO audit. In this video, we’ll cover how to set up and run an SEO audit. And stick around for a bonus tip on prioritizing fixes so you don’t waste time on things that don’t move the needle. Let’s jump in! You can audit your website in a few different ways. Let’s quickly go over your options: If you have a small website, you can check its sitemap and robots.txt file, and analyze indexing. But let’s be real—this gets overwhelming fast, especially for larger sites. Google Search Console is a great starting point for identifying indexing issues, redirect errors, soft 404s, etc. But it has two major limitations: First, it doesn’t detect deeper technical issues like duplicate content or orphaned pages.

Second, it only reports problems—it doesn’t help prioritize them. To get a full technical SEO health check, an automated tool like SE Ranking is the most efficient way to go. It scans your entire site, detects high-impact issues, and prioritizes fixes in just a few clicks. You can launch the check manually or set up an automated audit to find and fix issues quickly. Here's how to set up an automated audit with SE Ranking: First things first—decide how often you want the audit to run. You can schedule it to run weekly or monthly on a specific day and time that works for you. Next, pick the pages you want the tool to crawl. You’ve got several options here, which include: All pages starting from the homepage All subdomain pages All pages specified in the XML sitemap Then, set up some rules for the crawl. You can choose whether the bot should follow or ignore instructions from your site’s robots.txt file,

Noindex, or Nofollow tags. And if you need to skip certain sections or pages, you can easily deactivate them. By default, SE Ranking uses its own bot, but there are 13 other bots you can choose from if needed. Here’s a pro tip: If your website relies on JavaScript to load content, enable JavaScript Rendering, so you don’t miss hidden issues. Next up, define how deep the crawl should go. You can set limits on the number of pages, server requests, and redirects. Now, choose which version of SE Ranking’s Website Audit you want to use. I recommend going with Version 2.0 as it’s packed with improvements, like an updated list of checks, a cleaner Issue Report layout, and better weighting for different issues. You can also customize specific audit parameters here like the title & meta description length limits, maximum page size, minimum word count per page, etc. Finally, decide which issues the audit should track. You can enable or disable separate issues or even entire categories. With that setup, SE Ranking will handle the heavy lifting for you. But because not every

issue impacts your website the same way, we’ve got some prioritizing work to do, don't we? While some issues can wait, others need fixing ASAP. Here are some of the technical issues you definitely need to check: Make sure your security certificate and protocol version are up-to-date and that your pages use HTTPs protocol. Verify that important pages aren’t blocked by robots.txt, noindex, or X-Robots-Tag and are returning a 200 status code. Avoid redirect chains and loops. Your sitemap should be clean. That means no 4XX/5XX errors, redirects, or noindex pages. All links should point to live pages—as in not to broken internal or outbound links. A few more critical checks include: Check the title and description tags as well as their length. Watch out for duplicate content and missing H1 tags. And ensure images have alt attributes. HTML code must be optimized and CWV metrics must be within the limits.

Also, check that your JS and CSS files are compressed and return 200 status codes. And make sure your viewport meta tag isn’t missing and contains the device-width value. Alright, so you’ve run an audit, found and fixed a bunch of common top issues, but there’s still a lot on your plate. What next? Here’s a bonus tip on what else you should be on the lookout for: Assess the severity of the issue Classify every issue as critical, major, or minor and assign a priority to each of them. This is where categorizing errors in Website Audit can help: from Passed checks marked with a Green check mark where you're all good to critical issues marked with a Red cross. You can even filter by priority to pull up the most urgent issues first. Evaluate the scope of the problem An issue affecting your entire website is far more critical than a problem on just a few pages. So click on the number next to an issue to see exactly which pages are affected. Consider page importance Pages that sell the most, drive the most organic traffic to your site,

or inform your clients about your brand, are essential. Prioritize fixes for them. You can check the Pages report and apply filters to analyze specific pages and issues. Balance impact vs. effort Some fixes require more work than others. Prioritize quick wins—issues that are easy to fix but have a noticeable impact. Now it’s your turn! Set up your technical SEO audit with SE Ranking and start fixing issues before they impact your rankings. Link in the description! For more SEO insights, subscribe to our YouTube channel. See you in the next video!