Absolutely Free SEO Technical Audit Checklist

Domain Information

  • Age of the domain – review domain history and authority
  • Indexed pages – verify how many pages Google has indexed
  • Domain Rating (DR) – check with Ahrefs or similar
  • Domain Authority (DA) – check with Moz or similar

On-Site Essentials

  • HTTPS – must have zero SSL errors
  • robots.txt – should exist and be valid
  • sitemap.xml – should exist and be submitted to Google

Redirects

  • HTTP → HTTPS – must redirect properly on all URL levels
  • WWW ↔ non-WWW – must redirect properly on all URL levels
  • /home or /index – should redirect to domain or 404 (canonical tag optional)
  • Trailing slash – must be consistent
  • Redirect chains – should not exist

URL Structure

  • Use lowercase characters
  • Keep URLs around 70 characters
  • Use hyphens (“-”) instead of underscores (“_”)
  • Keep URLs friendly, without file extensions

Error Handling

  • 500 errors – must redirect to a custom error page
  • 400 errors – must show “Page Not Found”

Multilingual Sites

  • Multilingual URL structure – must exist
  • Hreflang tags – must exist
  • HTML lang attribute – must exist

Homepage & Landing Page Tests

  • Mobile PageSpeed – Google score should be 90%+
  • Desktop PageSpeed – Google score should be 90%+
  • JavaScript errors – none should exist
  • W3C Markup Validation – zero errors
  • Google Lighthouse Audit:
    • Performance ≥ 80%
    • Accessibility = 100%
    • Best Practices ≥ 80%
    • SEO ≥ 90%
  • Rich Snippets validator – zero errors
  • AMP validator – zero errors

Screaming Frog Tests

Response Codes

  • No Response – zero results
  • Client Errors (4xx) – zero results
  • Server Errors (5xx) – zero results

Page Titles

  • Missing titles – zero results
  • Duplicate titles – zero results
  • Titles over 65 characters – zero results
  • Titles under 30 characters – zero results

Meta Descriptions

  • Missing descriptions – zero results
  • Duplicate descriptions – zero results
  • Over 156 characters – zero results
  • Under 70 characters – zero results

H1 Tags

  • Missing H1 tags – zero results
  • Duplicate H1 tags – zero results
  • Multiple H1 tags per page – zero results

Images

  • Missing alt text – zero results
  • Alt text over 100 characters – zero results

Canonicals

  • Missing canonical tags – zero results

Open Graph Tags

  • Missing Open Graph tags – zero results

From the button below, you can download our Technical SEO Checklist which we use as a reference point for all our Technical SEO Audits.

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Please note that behind all these requirements there are reasons … (The post will be updated with more information in near future).

In addition: The most important thing is the SEO conclusions and opportunities that we can discover from it but not the results themselves