The technical SEO audit checklist we run on every site (no $100/mo tool needed)

We maintain 10+ web products, and before any of them ships content we run the same technical SEO pass. None of it requires an expensive suite - most of it is free if you know where to look. Here's the exact checklist, grouped so you fix root causes once instead of chasing symptoms.

1. Crawlability and indexability (fix these first)

Nothing else matters if Google can't crawl or index the page.

• robots.txt - make sure you're not accidentally Disallow-ing important paths, and that your sitemap is declared with a Sitemap: line.
• Noindex tags - search your templates for stray noindex. A single misplaced meta tag on a layout file can deindex a whole section.
• Canonicals - every page should have a self-referencing canonical unless it's deliberately pointing elsewhere. Watch for canonicals that point to a redirect or a 404 - Google ignores those and picks its own.
• Sitemap hygiene - your sitemap should only contain canonical, indexable, 200-status URLs.

Quick check: in Google Search Console, the Pages report tells you exactly what's indexed and why the rest isn't. It's free and it's the source of truth.

2. Links and redirects

Broken links waste crawl budget and leak authority.

• Broken internal links (404s) - fix or remove them.
• Redirect chains - A -> B -> C should be A -> C. Every hop loses a little authority.
• Broken redirects - a redirect that lands on a 404 is worse than no redirect.
• Orphan pages - pages with zero internal links pointing to them. (Careful detecting these: if your crawler times out building the link graph, it'll report every page as an orphan. Make sure your incoming-link count actually resolved before trusting it.)

3. On-page basics that still move rankings

Unglamorous, still effective.

• Titles - unique, descriptive, not truncated. Flag missing, duplicate, too-long, too-short.
• Meta descriptions - same treatment. They don't directly rank you but they drive click-through.
• One H1 per page, with a sane heading hierarchy (H1 -> H2 -> H3, no skipping straight to H3).
• Structured data - if you use JSON-LD, validate it. Invalid schema can throw errors in Search Console and block rich results. A common one: putting aggregateRating on an object type that doesn't support it.

4. International (if you have it)

Hreflang is the single most error-prone area of technical SEO.

• Every hreflang annotation needs a reciprocal return tag.
• Include a self-referencing hreflang.
• Don't point hreflang at redirected or broken URLs.
• Make sure html lang matches the hreflang you're claiming.

5. PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals

Real-world performance, not lab vanity numbers.

• Run PageSpeed Insights on your key templates (home, a product/post page, a category page).
• Watch LCP, CLS, INP. Common wins: compress images, add font-display: swap, defer render-blocking JS/CSS, serve assets gzipped/brotli.

How to run this without paying $100+/month

You can cover a lot for free:

• Google Search Console + PageSpeed Insights - free, authoritative, have them regardless.
• Screaming Frog free tier - crawls up to 500 URLs, great for small sites.
• For site-wide crawls on bigger sites without the subscription, we built our own tool (Kalenux SEO Audit) because we were tired of paying monthly just to re-audit our own properties - it runs the whole checklist above plus PageSpeed from the browser, one-time pricing instead of a sub. It's the technical-audit piece only, not a keyword suite, so pair it with whatever you use for keyword research.

The point isn't the tool. 80% of technical SEO problems come from this short list, and you can catch almost all of them without an enterprise subscription. Run the checklist, fix root causes, re-crawl, and move on.