Run a technical SEO audit

A technical audit that checks ten thousand URLs equally produces a list nobody acts on. This one starts from the pages Search Console says earn the traffic, checks those first, and reports every finding with the clicks at stake next to it.

Sequel supplies the traffic data. The page checks use your own browsing: fetch the URLs yourself. If you cannot fetch pages, run steps 1 and 3, report the sitemap coverage findings, and say the page-level checks were skipped.

Steps

1. Build the priority list. google_search_console.query with dimensions: ["page"], a 90-day window ending 3 days ago, rowLimit: 1000. Sorted by clicks, this is the order in which every check below is run and reported.

2. Fetch robots.txt and the sitemap. Read /robots.txt for Sitemap: lines and crawl rules, then fetch the sitemap (or sitemap index and its children) and collect every URL it lists.

3. Check sitemap coverage both ways. Search Console pages with clicks that are absent from the sitemap: Google found them by other means, and the sitemap is incomplete. Sitemap URLs with zero impressions in 90 days: either not indexed or not worth listing. Report both lists with counts.

4. Check the top pages. Take the top 50 by clicks (say how many you did). For each, fetch and record: final status code and the number of redirect hops to reach it; the canonical URL and whether it points at itself; any noindex in meta robots or the X-Robots-Tag header; the title and its length; the meta description and its length; the number of H1 elements; hreflang and lang where present. Use sequel_workbench to run the fetches in a loop if you can execute code; otherwise fetch sequentially and lower the count.

5. Grade the findings.

   • Critical: a page with clicks that returns 4xx or 5xx; a page with clicks carrying noindex; a page with clicks whose canonical points at a different URL.
   • High: a redirect chain on a page with clicks; a missing or duplicated title among the top pages; sitemap entries that redirect or 404.
   • Medium: missing descriptions, multiple H1s, titles over 60 characters, descriptions over 155. For each finding, attach the clicks of the affected page from step 1.

6. Report. Findings first, grouped by severity, each row: URL, clicks at stake, the issue, the fix. Then the sitemap coverage summary. Then one sentence on what was not checked (Core Web Vitals, structured data, rendering) so the reader knows the scope. Continue with redirect-chain-audit if chains were found and with metadata-audit if titles were the main problem.

Gotchas

• A noindex or an off-page canonical may be deliberate. Report it as an observation with the clicks at stake and ask; do not call it a bug until the user confirms it was unintended.
• Fetch as a normal browser would. Some sites serve different heads to bots. If a canonical or robots tag is injected by JavaScript, your fetch will not see it; say so if the HTML looks thin.
• Do not crawl the whole site. Fifty to a few hundred pages, chosen by traffic, is the audit. Thousands of fetches is a load test.
• Sitemaps should list only canonical, indexable, 200 URLs. Anything else in one is a finding by itself.
• Search Console lags 2 to 3 days. End the window 3 days back.