How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit in 2025 (Step-by-Step Guide) | CrawlRaven

Step 1: Crawl your website

The first step in any technical SEO audit is to crawl your entire website to discover all pages, identify errors, and collect data. Use a crawler like CrawlRaven, Screaming Frog, or Sitebulb. Enter your homepage URL and let the crawler follow all internal links.

Key data to collect during the crawl:

HTTP status codes (200, 301, 302, 404, 500)
Title tags and meta descriptions
H1 tags and header structure
Canonical URLs
Noindex tags
Internal link structure
Image alt text
Page load time

Step 2: Check crawlability and indexation

Check whether search engines can crawl and index your important pages:

Validate your robots.txt — ensure it's not accidentally blocking important sections
Check your XML sitemap — validate it's correct and submitted to Google Search Console
Verify canonical tags — check for self-referencing canonicals and cross-domain issues
Audit noindex tags — ensure they're only on pages you intentionally want to exclude

Step 3: Analyze on-page technical elements

For each crawled page, review:

Title tags: unique, 50–60 characters, contains primary keyword
Meta descriptions: unique, 120–160 characters, compelling copy
H1 tags: one per page, contains primary keyword
Content: original, matches search intent, minimum 300 words
Images: compressed, with descriptive alt text

Step 4: Assess page speed and Core Web Vitals

Google uses Core Web Vitals (CWV) as a ranking factor. Check your CWV scores using Google Search Console or CrawlRaven's built-in performance analysis:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Should be under 2.5 seconds
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Should be under 0.1
INP (Interaction to Next Paint): Should be under 200ms

Step 5: Audit internal and external links

Run a link audit to find:

Broken internal links (returning 404 errors)
Broken external links
Redirect chains and loops
Pages with no internal links (orphan pages)
Excessive outbound links on single pages

Step 6: Validate structured data

Use Google's Rich Results Test and CrawlRaven's schema checker to validate your JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa implementations. Fix any errors to maximize your eligibility for rich results.

Step 7: Prioritize and create an action plan

Sort all issues by impact and effort. Fix critical errors (broken pages, crawl blocks, Core Web Vitals failures) first. Then address high-impact on-page issues, followed by quick wins.

CrawlRaven automatically prioritizes all issues by estimated SEO impact, so you always know what to fix first.