You can have a great looking website with well written pages and still struggle to appear on Google. Often the reason sits under the bonnet. Broken links, slow pages, missing titles or pages that search engines cannot reach will all hold a site back, however good the design.
A technical SEO audit is simply a structured health check that finds those problems so you can fix them. If you are a sole trader, a start up or a small business owner with a WordPress or Shopify site, you can do a solid first audit yourself in a couple of hours with free or low cost site audit tools. Here is how.
Step 1: Make sure Google can find and index your pages
Start with the most basic question: does Google know your pages exist? Set up Google Search Console if you have not already. It is free and, once your site is verified, shows which pages are indexed and which are not, and why.
Check that you have submitted an XML sitemap. Most website builders and SEO plugins create one automatically, so just paste its address into Search Console. Then look at the page indexing report. Excluded pages are not always a problem, as thank you pages, for example, should stay out of search. But if an important service page is missing, find out why before you do anything else.
Step 2: Run a full crawl using site audit tools
Next, scan your whole site the way a search engine would. You do not need expensive software, as cheap SEO tools and free versions cover what most small sites need. Ubersuggest’s Site Audit is a straightforward option. Enter your domain and it crawls your pages, gives you a site health score as a quick read on overall website health and lists the issues it finds in order of priority, with onsite recommendations on how to fix each one. If dozens of warnings come back, start with the most serious and work down the list.
Step 3: Fix broken links and redirects
Broken links frustrate visitors and waste the attention search engines give your site. Most site audit tools will show pages returning a 404 error and any internal links pointing to them. Update the link or set up a redirect.
When you move or rename a page, use a permanent 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. This matters most after a redesign, when page addresses often change. Also watch for redirect chains, where one redirect leads to another, and point the original link straight at the final page.
Step 4: Check page speed and mobile performance
Slow websites lose visitors, particularly on mobile, so speed is a core part of technical SEO. Google’s Core Web Vitals measure how quickly your main content loads, how quickly it responds to a tap or click, and whether the layout jumps around while it loads. You can see these scores for your site in Search Console, and Ubersuggest’s audit also includes page speed checks.
The most common causes on small business sites are oversized images, too many plugins and cheap hosting that struggles under load. Resize and compress images before uploading, remove plugins you no longer use and consider a caching plugin if you are on WordPress. Then open your site on your phone. If buttons are hard to tap or text is tiny, fix that too, as Google judges your site mainly on its mobile version.
Step 5: Review titles, descriptions and headings
Every page should have a unique title tag and meta description that clearly says what the page is about. Your audit will flag pages where these are missing, duplicated or too long. Duplicates are common on template sites, where every page ends up titled with just the business name.
Write titles that put the main service and location first, such as “Emergency Electrician in Leeds” followed by your business name. Keep descriptions to around 150 to 160 characters and make them tempting enough to click. Check that each page has one clear H1 heading.
Step 6: Look for duplicate and thin content
Search engines struggle when several pages say almost the same thing, which often happens with similar product pages or location pages that only swap the town name. Where pages genuinely need to be similar, use a canonical tag to tell Google which version is the main one.
Thin pages with only a sentence or two rarely rank well either. If your audit flags very low word counts, expand those pages with useful information or merge them into a stronger one. A single detailed page about your kitchen fitting service will usually do better than five sparse ones.
Step 7: Check security, structured data and images
Make sure your whole site loads securely, with a valid SSL certificate and the padlock showing in the browser, and that the insecure version redirects to it.
Then consider structured data, sometimes called schema markup. Adding LocalBusiness details such as your name, address, phone number and opening hours helps search engines understand who you are. Many SEO plugins can do this. Finally, give images short, descriptive file names and alt text, which helps both accessibility and image search.
Step 8: Prioritise, fix and recheck
Once you have your findings, decide what to tackle first. Problems that stop pages being indexed or make the site painfully slow come before minor warnings. Keep a note of what you changed and when, so you can link any rise or fall in traffic to a specific fix.
After making changes, run the crawl again in Ubersuggest to confirm the issues have cleared, and ask Google to recrawl key pages through Search Console. Repeat the audit every few months, or after any big change such as a redesign, a new theme or a new host. Web designers who look after several client sites often use SEO tools for agencies so they can run the same checks across every project.
Keeping your website in good technical shape
A technical SEO audit is not a one off job. Websites change as you add pages, install plugins and update themes, and small problems creep back in.
Run regular checks with your chosen site audit tools, deal with the serious issues first and keep things tidy as you go. Visitors will get a faster, smoother experience, and search engines will find it easier to understand and rank the pages that matter to your business.
