A technical SEO audit checks whether Google can crawl, render and index your pages, and whether real visitors get a fast, stable experience. We review crawl paths, index coverage, Core Web Vitals field data, redirects, canonicals, internal links, JavaScript rendering and structured data, then deliver a prioritized fix list with a walkthrough call.
What a technical SEO audit actually answers
Most audit tools count problems. We answer three questions instead: can Google reach every page that should rank, does it choose the right version of each page, and does the page load well for real visitors on real phones. If the answer to any of those is no, content and links will underperform no matter how good they are.
For a Naples business the stakes are seasonal. Search demand for restaurants, home services, rentals and medical practices climbs from late fall into spring. A site that loses index coverage in October may not recover until the busy months are half over, so we time audits and fixes ahead of season whenever we can.
Crawl and index coverage
We crawl the site with a desktop crawler and compare that list against three others: your XML sitemap, the Search Console page indexing report, and the URLs that actually earn impressions. The gaps between those lists are where the problems live.
- Crawled but not indexed usually points to thin or near-duplicate pages, such as one location page cloned for five towns.
- Indexed but not in the sitemap often means parameter URLs, tag archives or staging copies leaking into Google.
- In the sitemap but blocked means robots.txt, a stray
noindex, or a redirect is contradicting what the sitemap tells Google.
Where you can export server logs, we also check which URLs Googlebot requests and how often. Logs show what Google really fetches, which is sometimes very different from what the crawler finds.
Speed: field data first, lab data second
Google's Core Web Vitals use field data, meaning measurements from real Chrome users, judged at the 75th percentile of page loads. The thresholds on web.dev are: Largest Contentful Paint (when the main content appears) at 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint (how fast the page responds to a tap) at 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the page jumps) at 0.1 or less. INP replaced First Input Delay in 2024.
A PageSpeed score is lab data from one simulated load. It is useful for debugging, but it is not what Google assesses. That is why a site can score 90 in the lab and still fail in Search Console.
Most sites are not passing. The 2025 Web Almanac found only 48% of mobile sites had good Core Web Vitals, against 56% on desktop. On mobile, LCP passed for 62% of sites, INP for 77% and CLS for 81%, so LCP is usually the culprit. Deeper speed work lives on our site speed optimization page.
Redirects, canonicals and internal links
These three signals tell Google which URL is the real one. When they disagree, Google picks for you.
- Redirects: we flag chains and loops, 302s that should be 301s, and old URLs that redirect to the homepage instead of the closest match. Google's site move guidance says to redirect straight to the final destination and keep redirects for at least a year.
- Canonicals: each indexable page should point to itself, and canonicals should never point at redirected, noindexed or 404 URLs.
- Internal links: we measure how many clicks each money page sits from the homepage and find orphan pages with no internal links at all.
If a redesign caused the drop, our site migration SEO service rebuilds the redirect map URL by URL.
JavaScript rendering, structured data and mobile
Page builders and booking widgets often load key content with JavaScript. We compare the raw HTML with the rendered page to confirm that headings, body copy, links and prices exist in what Google renders, not only in what a browser shows after scripts run.
We validate structured data against Google's rules for each type, check that it matches the visible page, and confirm the business name, phone and address agree with your Google Business Profile. Details are on our schema markup page. Mobile checks cover tap target spacing, text size, intrusive pop-ups and content that is hidden or missing on phones.
How findings are prioritized
Every finding gets two scores: likely impact on crawling, indexing or rankings, and the effort to fix it. The fix list is sorted from the top left of this grid.
| Priority | Impact | Effort | Typical examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fix now | High | Low | Stray noindex, robots.txt block, redirect to homepage, wrong canonical |
| Plan this month | High | High | LCP failures from heavy themes, JavaScript-only content, duplicate location pages |
| Batch together | Low | Low | Redirect chains, missing alt text, sitemap clean-up |
| Revisit later | Low | High | Full URL restructure for cosmetic reasons |
We name the owner of each fix (you, your developer, your host or us) so nothing sits in limbo. Scope and quote details are on the SEO audit pricing page.