How to Read a Technical SEO Audit Without Getting Lost

Run any website through an SEO crawler and you will get a long list of “errors”, “warnings” and “notices”. Many businesses either panic or give up. Neither is necessary. Most of the list does not matter much. A few items matter a great deal.

Step 1: Start with indexation

The most important question is simple: are the pages that make you money indexed, under the right URL?

• In Google Search Console, open the Pages report and check why pages are not indexed.
• Look specifically at your key service, product and category pages.
• “Crawled - currently not indexed” on important pages suggests quality or duplication concerns.
• “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical” means Google disagrees with your canonical tags.

An indexation problem on ten important pages outweighs a thousand missing image alt attributes.

Step 2: Check crawlability

• Robots.txt: make sure nothing important is blocked.
• Noindex tags: check they have not been left on pages after a redesign - it happens more than you would think.
• Internal links: important pages should be reachable within a few clicks from the homepage.
• Broken links and redirect chains: fix the ones on important pages and in the navigation first.

Step 3: Look for duplication at scale

Duplicate content problems usually come from templates, not individual pages: URL parameters, filters, print versions, HTTP/HTTPS or www/non-www variants, trailing slashes. Fix the pattern once and thousands of URLs are resolved.

Step 4: Assess page experience

Use the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console, which groups similar URLs together. Focus on templates that fail - for example “all product pages have poor LCP” - rather than chasing individual scores.

Step 5: Structured data

Validate structured data with Google’s Rich Results Test. Errors on types that generate rich results (products, articles, breadcrumbs) matter; warnings about optional properties usually do not.

How to prioritise

For each issue, ask three questions:

1. How many important pages does it affect?
2. How severe is the effect? Blocked from indexing is severe; a slightly long title is not.
3. How hard is it to fix?

High impact, low effort goes first. Low impact, high effort may never be worth doing.

What you can usually ignore

• Meta descriptions slightly over the “recommended” length.
• Multiple H1 tags on a page with a clear structure.
• Low word count warnings on pages that are meant to be short, such as contact pages.
• Generic “text to HTML ratio” scores.

A good audit does this prioritisation for you. If yours does not, it is a list - not a plan.