Technical SEO Audit Checklist: 47 Checks We Run on Every Site

Every engagement at The Quantum SEO starts the same way: a technical audit. Not because it’s glamorous, but because no amount of content or links can outrank a broken foundation. This is the checklist we run on every site, distilled from hundreds of audits.

1. Crawlability and indexation

Start with the basics: can search engines reach your pages, and are the right ones indexed? We check robots.txt for accidental blocks, review XML sitemaps for stale or non-indexable URLs, and compare pages crawled against pages indexed. A gap bigger than 20% means something is eating your crawl budget — usually faceted navigation, infinite calendars, or parameter URLs.

2. Rendering and Core Web Vitals

Fetch the page as Googlebot and compare it to what users see. If your content depends on JavaScript that the crawler doesn’t execute reliably, you’re invisible for your most important terms. Then measure Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift on real devices — lab scores lie, field data doesn’t.

3. Information architecture and schema

Click depth matters: money pages buried four clicks deep get a fraction of the authority they deserve. Flatten the architecture, fix orphan pages, and deploy schema — Organization, BreadcrumbList, Article, Product, FAQ — everywhere it applies. Rich results are the closest thing to free real estate in the SERPs.

Run these 47 checks quarterly, not once. Technical SEO decays the moment you stop watching it — every deploy, every plugin update, every CMS migration is a chance to break something silently.