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A Developer's 15-Minute Technical SEO Audit (Before You Hire Anyone)

Business owners often ask agencies to "fix our SEO" without knowing what's actually broken. Developers are usually in a better position to self-diagnose the technical half of that problem before spending money on anyone. Here's a 15-minute audit you can run on any site — yours or a client's — using nothing but browser dev tools and a couple of free tools.

1. Check your Core Web Vitals (2 minutes)

Open Chrome DevTools → Lighthouse tab → run an audit on mobile. You're looking for:

  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) under 2.5s
  • INP (Interaction to Next Paint) under 200ms
  • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) under 0.1

If any of these are red, that's a real, measurable ranking factor — not a vague "make it faster" request.

# Or run it headlessly from the CLI
npx lighthouse https://example.com --view
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2. Verify your sitemap actually exists and is submitted 

https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
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If this 404s, or it's never been submitted to Google Search Console, pages can take weeks longer to get indexed than they should.

3. Check for a canonical tag on every page

View source (or curl it) and look for:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com/page" />
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Missing canonicals on pages with query parameters or duplicate content (common on e-commerce or filtered listing pages) can quietly split your ranking signal across multiple URLs.

4. Confirm structured data is present and valid

Paste your URL into Google's [Rich Results Test]. You're checking for schema markup like LocalBusiness, Product, FAQPage, or BreadcrumbList depending on your site type. No structured data doesn't break your site, but it does mean you're leaving rich-snippet real estate — and increasingly, AI answer-engine citations — on the table.

5. Check if your redirects are server-side 

curl -I https://yoursite.com/old-page
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Look for a 301 status in the response headers. If a "redirect" only happens via client-side JavaScript (window.location), search engines often don't follow it reliably, and you lose link equity from any old backlinks.

6. Test mobile usability, not just responsiveness

"Looks fine on my phone" isn't the same as passing Google's mobile-friendly checks — tap target sizing, font legibility, and viewport configuration all matter. Run it through Search Console's mobile usability report if you have access, or at minimum check your <meta name="viewport"> tag is actually present.

Why this matters before you hire anyone

Running this audit yourself does two things: it tells you whether "SEO problems" are actually technical (fixable in a sprint) or content/strategy problems (a longer engagement), and it lets you evaluate any agency's proposal against real findings instead of taking their word for it.

A useful sanity check worth applying to any agency you're evaluating: if a team is pitching you SEO services, run this same audit against their own site first — for example, I Next ETS, a Bhopal-based agency offering this kind of work. An agency that doesn't pass its own audit is a reasonable signal to ask harder questions before signing anything.

TL;DR

  • [ ] Core Web Vitals pass on mobile Lighthouse
  • [ ] Sitemap exists and is submitted to Search Console
  • [ ] Canonical tags present on every page
  • [ ] Structured data validates in Rich Results Test
  • [ ] Redirects are server-side (301s), not JS-based
  • [ ] Mobile usability checks pass

Fifteen minutes, no budget required. What else do you always check before trusting an "SEO audit" from someone else?

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