Technical SEO Audits: Uncover Hidden Issues Holding Your Website Back

A technical SEO audit is a deep dive into your website’s health. It highlights problems that may be slowing you down, blocking your content from being seen, or creating poor experiences for users. 

By understanding and fixing technical issues, you can: 

• Speed up your website: Fast-loading pages help users stay engaged. Plus, Google has been clear it wants websites to give users a good experience. That means pages that load quickly and don’t frustrate people by elements (think, contact forms) moving around when someone loads a page. 

• Improve website accessibility: Accessibility makes your site usable for people with disabilities. This often aligns with SEO best practices and helps you reach more users. 

• Help search engines find your content: If search engines can’t properly crawl or index your site, your content may never appear in search results, even if it’s great. 

• Make your site mobile-friendly: With Google’s mobile-first indexing and the majority of New Zealand users browsing on phones, mobile experience isn’t optional—it’s essential. 

A good audit looks at how your website performs beneath the surface: how fast it loads, how easy it is to navigate, how well search engines can understand it, and whether anything is blocking your content from showing up. 

Here’s what should be reviewed—and why it matters. 

1. Crawlability

   Can search engines access your website? 

   Search engines need a clear path to reach your pages. If something is blocking them, your content can’t appear in search. 

   This part of the audit looks at: 

   • Your robots.txt file to make sure nothing important is accidentally blocked 
   • Your sitemap to confirm it’s clean, up to date, and guiding search engines to the right pages 
   • Your URL structure to avoid confusing or duplicate versions of the same page 

   This is the first step in making sure Google can actually find your website. 

   Tip: Use Google Search Console’s ‘URL Inspection’ tool to check whether Google can access a specific page. If it can’t crawl the page, you’ll see what’s blocking it. 

2. Indexability

   Can search engines show your pages in search results? 

   Even if Google can crawl a page, it doesn’t mean it will index it. Technical issues can prevent important pages from appearing in search results. 

   An audit looks for: 

   • Noindex tags that may be hiding pages you do want visible 
   • Duplicate versions of a page competing with each other 
   • Warnings or errors in Google Search Console that highlight indexing problems 

   If a page isn’t indexed, it’s invisible—no matter how valuable the content is. 

   Tip: Some pages (such as login pages and thank you pages) should be noindexed. Google Search Console will reveal which pages on your site are noindexed. 

3. Core Web Vitals & Site Speed
   
   
   

   How fast is your website? 

   Users expect fast websites and will click away if they have to wait for elements on a page to load. While not a direct ranking factor, high performance metrics can place you above competitors with poor performance. 

   An audit reveals: 

   • Load speed checks across mobile and desktop 
   • Core Web Vitals insights (how quickly content appears, how responsive your site is, and how stable the layout is) 
   • Clear recommendations to make your website faster and more user-friendly 

   Improvements to page speed and Core Web Vitals can have an impact on user engagement and potentially conversions. 

   Tips: Compress images before uploading them. Large image files are a common reason websites load slowly. Tools like TinyPNG or built-in CMS plugins work well. 

4. Mobile Experience

   Is your website easy to use on a phone? 

   With mobile-first indexing, Google primarily evaluates your site’s mobile version. If the mobile experience is poor, rankings can suffer even if the desktop version looks great. 

   An audit should assess: 

   • Text and button sizes 
   • Navigation and menu behaviour 
   • Layout responsiveness 
   • Any pop-ups or elements that make content hard to access 

   In New Zealand, most website traffic now comes from mobile—so this is an important part of any technical SEO audit. 

   Tip: Open your website on your phone and navigate it as if you were a customer. If you need to pinch-zoom, struggle to tap buttons, or can’t read text easily, those are issues Google notices too.  

5. Website Structure & Internal Links

   Is your content easy to navigate? 

   Your website’s structure helps both users and search engines understand which pages are most important. 

   An audit reviews: 

   • Whether your pages are organised in a logical hierarchy 
   • How many clicks it takes to reach key content 
   • Whether internal links support the pages you most want to rank 
   • Pages that have no links pointing to them 

   A well-structured website makes it easier for search engines to understand your business and easier for users to find what they need. 

   Tips: Make sure all indexed pages have internal links pointing to them and use natural language as anchor text rather than words like ‘click here’. 

6. Technical Health Checks

   

   What are some essential ‘under the hood’ factors? 

   An audit will look at: 

   • Schema markup (structured data) that helps search engines understand your content 
   • Broken links and 404 errors 
   • Redirect chains that slow users down 
   • HTTPS and security issues that can damage credibility 
   • Inconsistent URLs, outdated plugins, or CMS-related problems 

   Cleaning up these areas strengthens your overall site health. 

   Tip: Check your website for broken links every few months. Free online link checkers, like Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker make this easy. 

7. On-Page Elements

   Do your pages clearly communicate what they’re about? 

   This is where technical and content SEO meet. Even well-written content can underperform if the on-page structure is unclear. 

   An audit looks at: 

   • Page titles and meta descriptions 
   • Heading structure (correct use of H1s and H2s) 
   • Duplicate or thin content 
   • Keyword cannibalisation (multiple pages targeting the same topic) 

   The goal is to ensure each page has a clear purpose and supports your broader SEO strategy. 

   Tip: Each page on your site should have one main focus. If multiple pages target the same topic, consider combining them. Google prefers one strong page over several competing ones.