5 min read
What a real technical SEO audit actually includes
Half the "SEO audits" on the market are an automated PDF from a tool, printed and stamped with a logo. A real technical audit is something else: a manual diagnosis of why Google is not giving you the traffic your content deserves. Here is what it must contain.
Crawling and indexing
The first question is banal but decisive: can Google even see your pages? The audit checks robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, redirects, broken links and pages dropped from the index — and why. For bilingual sites this includes hreflang: a wrong hreflang quietly kills rankings in one language.
This is also where the classics surface: duplicate content from filters and parameters, redirect chains, and orphan pages with no internal link pointing to them.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google measures the real experience: how fast content appears (LCP), how fast the page responds (INP) and how much the layout jumps (CLS). The audit measures these on real devices and names the specific culprits — usually images, third-party scripts and fonts.
What matters is not the score but the fix list ordered by impact: which three changes move the result the most for the least effort.
Structure, content and structured data
Architecture answers the question "which page competes for which query". The audit finds cannibalization (two pages fighting for one keyword), missing pages for searches with real volume, and broken internal hierarchy.
Structured data — Organization, FAQ, products, breadcrumbs — is what unlocks rich results in Google. We check not just that it exists, but that it is valid and matches the visible content.
What you get at the end
The output of a real audit is not a PDF with 197 warnings, but a prioritized plan: what gets fixed this week, what this month, what is strategic. Every item with expected impact and an effort estimate. If the audit you were offered does not look like this — it is not an audit, it is a formality.
We run technical SEO audits with 180+ checkpoints and a plan ordered by return — for sites in Bulgarian, English or both. Request an audit for your site.
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