Technical SEO Audit: What Do We Look for on a Company Website?

A technical SEO audit reveals what’s preventing Google from finding, understanding, and ranking your website well. For larger companies, this is rarely a single issue. Rather, it’s a collection of many small problems that have accumulated over the years: old subpages, campaign pages, plugin remnants, and unfinished translations.

Below, we'll go over what we review during an audit and what issues typically come to light.

Why isn't an SEO plugin's green light enough?

SEO plugins are useful: they help fill in the title and meta description, and generate a sitemap. However, they don’t detect that the homepage loads 8 MB on mobile devices, that the robots.txt file isn’t even accessible due to a server rule, or that the English pages have Hungarian canonical tags. These errors are in the code and server settings, not in the editor interface.

What does a technical SEO audit examine?

Crawling and Indexing

We’ll check what Google sees: whether the robots.txt file is accessible, what the sitemap contains, and whether it includes any pages that shouldn’t be there (such as a thank-you page or a duplicate archive). We’ll check the noindex and canonical settings, 404 pages, and redirect chains.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google looks at three metrics: the loading time of the largest contentful paint (LCP—ideally under 2.5 seconds), the initial input delay (INP—under 200 ms), and the cumulative layout shift (CLS—under 0.1). We measure these on mobile devices because rankings are based on the mobile view. Meanwhile, we look for what’s weighing down the page: videos, unoptimized images, JavaScript libraries loaded twice, and full icon fonts just for a few icons.

On our own website, for example, by re-encoding the hero and reference videos and removing unnecessary scripts, the download size of the home page was reduced by roughly half, while the visual experience remained the same.

Structure, Headings, and Internal Links

One H1 per page, a logical H2–H3 hierarchy, and internal links that direct both visitors and search engine crawlers to important pages. On larger sites, it’s common for service pages to have almost no links pointing to them, since all the links are in the menu.

Multilingualism and hreflang

If the site is available in multiple languages, check to make sure that the language versions link to each other correctly and that the English page isn't ranking for Hungarian search queries. We'll also review the machine-translated titles and descriptions, since these appear in the search results.

Structured Data

Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList: These help Google better understand who is behind the page and what it offers. We’ll check to see if the schema matches the visible content, because Google ignores any discrepancies.

Measurement

Are Search Console, GA4, and ad pixels working properly, and is cookie consent being handled correctly? An audit is only valuable if we can measure the impact of the fixes afterward.

What do you usually find on a large company's website?

The most common issues: duplicate content (the same article on multiple pages or domains), missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, content types omitted from the sitemap, heavy media files, and tracking codes that run twice or not at all. Individually, these may seem minor. Taken together, however, they’re enough to allow a competitor with weaker content to rank higher.

After the audit: Who will correct the errors?

This is where things usually get stuck. The SEO specialist hands over the list, the developer doesn’t have the resources to address it, and the marketing team is busy with campaigns in the meantime. That’s why we assess and fix the issues as part of the same team, and we measure results both before and after the fixes to see what impact they’ve had.

If you're curious about how your company's website is doing, check out the SEO Agency Visit our website or request a free estimate from us.