Technical SEO Audit Overview
Every project starts with a technical audit across four blocks: indexation, the GSC Pages report, rendering, and a full Screaming Frog crawl. Here's the map before you dive into each block.
What you'll learn
- Understand why the technical audit always comes first on a new project
- Learn the four blocks that make up a complete technical audit
- Know what each block is designed to catch
- Be able to prioritize findings by severity before writing tickets
Why Technical Audit Comes First
A technical audit is the mandatory first task on any new project. It finds the problems that stop Googlebot from seeing, crawling, and indexing pages at all — and no amount of great content or link building compensates for a site Google can't properly access.
The Four Blocks
| Block | Tool | What it finds |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Indexation check | GSC, robots.txt, sitemap.xml | Wrong pages in the index, blocked important pages, broken sitemap |
| 2. GSC Pages report | Google Search Console | The exact reason each URL is or isn't indexed — 10 distinct statuses |
| 3. Rendering check | GSC URL Inspection + Notepad++ Compare | Content, canonical, or schema hidden from Googlebot by JavaScript |
| 4. Screaming Frog crawl | Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Status codes, redirect chains, duplicate titles, broken links, missing H1s |
Prioritizing Findings
Not everything found is equally urgent. Sort issues into three tiers before writing tickets:
- Critical — server errors (500/503), important sections blocked in robots.txt, manual actions in GSC
- Important — redirect chains, duplicate title/description, missing H1s, broken internal links
- Recommendations — title/description length, missing alt attributes
Every finding from each block should turn into a specific ticket — never a vague instruction like "fix indexing." Each ticket needs: the exact problem, why it matters, and how success will be verified.
Key Takeaways
- The technical audit is always the first task on a new project — it is a prerequisite, not optional
- It has four blocks: indexation, GSC Pages report, rendering, and Screaming Frog crawl
- Each block catches a different category of problem — they are not redundant with each other
- Findings must be prioritized (critical / important / recommendation) before writing tickets
- Every ticket needs a specific problem, a business reason, and a way to verify the fix