Run any site through an SEO crawler and you'll get a long report full of red. Missing alt text, long titles, duplicate meta descriptions, a "text to HTML ratio" warning nobody can explain. It's easy to spend a month clearing warnings and see no change at all.

When we audit a site, we work through a short list in roughly this order. If something near the top is broken, nothing further down matters much yet.

1. Can search engines reach your pages?

Start with robots.txt and look for rules that block important sections, CSS, or JavaScript. Then check for noindex tags on pages that should rank. The most common culprit we see is a setting left over from a staging site or a redesign: one checkbox, and the whole site asks to be ignored.

2. Are the right pages indexed?

Google Search Console's page indexing report is the best free diagnostic available. We look at how many pages are indexed compared with how many should be, and at the reasons pages are left out. A large group under "Crawled, currently not indexed" usually points to thin or duplicate content. "Duplicate without user-selected canonical" means Google is choosing between near-identical pages for you.

3. Does each page have one address?

Your site should resolve to a single version: HTTPS, with or without www, but not both. Every other variant should redirect there in one step. Then check canonical tags. They should point to the version you want indexed, and they shouldn't contradict your redirects, your sitemap, or your internal links.

4. Redirects and broken links

Long redirect chains waste crawl effort and slow visitors down. Internal links that point at redirects or dead pages are worse. After a redesign or platform change, this is where most lost traffic goes. We map old URLs to new ones and fix internal links to point straight at the final address.

5. Internal linking and orphan pages

Pages that nothing links to, or that sit five or six clicks from the home page, tend to be crawled less and ranked lower. Your most important service and product pages should be linked from your navigation or from closely related pages, using descriptive link text.

6. Your XML sitemap

A sitemap should list the pages you want indexed, and only those: no redirects, no 404s, no pages marked noindex. It's a small thing, but a messy sitemap sends mixed signals and makes Search Console's reports harder to read.

7. Rendering

If your site relies heavily on JavaScript to display content, check what search engines actually see. Search Console's URL Inspection tool shows the rendered page. If key text or links only appear after a user interaction, there's a good chance they're being missed.

8. Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google's Core Web Vitals measure loading (Largest Contentful Paint), responsiveness (Interaction to Next Paint, which replaced First Input Delay in 2024), and visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift). We focus on the field data in Search Console, which reflects real visitors, rather than a single lab test. Oversized images, heavy third-party scripts, and slow hosting cause most of the problems we find.

9. Structured data

Schema markup helps search engines and answer engines understand what a page is about. We check that it's valid, that it matches what's visible on the page, and that it isn't claiming things the page doesn't support, such as reviews that aren't shown.

What can usually wait

  • Missing meta descriptions on old, low-traffic pages
  • Title tags a few characters over a tool's suggested limit
  • Warnings about having more than one H1
  • Low "text to HTML ratio" scores
  • Single redirects that already resolve in one hop

None of these are wrong to fix. They're just rarely the reason a site isn't performing, and fixing them first can hide the problems that are.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on your site's technical health, tell us about it. We'll start with the list above.