This is Part 2 of our step-by-step guide to On-Page SEO. Part 1 covers the content elements, whereas this guide covers a complete technical SEO audit with AI tools and time-saving automations.

Running a technical SEO audit is essential for uncovering the hidden issues that might be holding your site back in search—things like crawl errors, slow load times, and broken links. But if you stop there, you’re only seeing half the picture. A technically optimized website also delivers a seamless user experience (UX) that helps people and search engines find what they need faster.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to run a complete technical SEO audit—and we’ve included a free UX + SEO Performance Toolkit to help you go one step further by mapping your site structure, identifying content gaps, and planning smarter updates.

 

 

Once you’ve mastered the technical SEO fundamentals, you may want to take your auditing to the next level to close all the gaps in your strategy.  Well, we’ve got just the thing you need. Introducing the SEO Performance Toolkit: UX + SEO Audit Templates for Smarter Strategy.

This isn’t just a swipe file—it’s a strategic system built for marketers and SEO pros who want to confidently plan, audit, and scale their website content.

This free SEO Performance Toolkit gives you the exact templates you need to run a full content audit, map your site’s UX for both users and search engines, and uncover ranking opportunities hiding in plain sight.

It’s the system behind every high-performing content strategy we launch—and now it’s yours for free.

Inside, you’ll find a toolkit that helps you:

• Audit your entire site’s content and structure with clarity

• Spot keyword and content gaps that impact performance

• Map your site architecture with users and search engines in mind

• Plan UX improvements that increase engagement and SEO rankings

• Track technical fixes and strategic actions across your content

This file is ideal for:

• Marketing leads who want to keep SEO in-house but need a system

• Content teams planning site updates or restructures

• SEO freelancers or agencies who want to streamline audits

👉 Download the toolkit and start optimizing with clarity and confidence.

 

Let’s get started!

AI and Technical SEO in 2025

In 2025, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping technical SEO by automating previously manual processes and enhancing search algorithms. AI-driven tools like Google’s RankBrain and the evolution of Google’s AI-generated content guidelines are increasingly influential.

Key Areas of Impact:

• Content Analysis and Optimization: AI now effectively assesses content relevance, readability, and keyword placement, making optimized content more crucial.
• Enhanced Crawling and Indexing: AI algorithms prioritize pages based on user behavior data, improving crawling efficiency and accuracy.
• Personalized User Experiences: AI-driven analytics identify user intent more precisely, enhancing website structure and internal linking.
• Voice Search Optimization: With voice search popularity growing, optimizing for AI-driven voice assistants requires specific markup and structured data.

Using Tools and Automation To Audit

This guide will cover the technical components of your on-page SEO strategy and provide a free auditing checklist.

SEO Tools

Google Search Console (Free): Use this to monitor your keywords and other key SEO-related data, such as indexing requests, enhancements reporting, and troubleshooting.
SEMRush   (an all-in-one platform where you can use a limited free account or upgrade to a paid one). This will help you with strategy and all tactical SEO-related tasks.
SurferSEO (Surfer is another all-in-one platform for keyword research, content creation, and optimization.) Pricing starts at $79 a month. I would suggest trying it for content analysis and optimization.

Below, we’ll walk through a detailed workflow for using SEMRush to run your Audit. You can run a site audit using the free tool, but if you plan to do your own audits long-term, you will want to upgrade to access more tools.

To set up a Site Audit, you must first create a Project for the domain. Once you have your new project, select the “Set up” button in the Site Audit block of your Project interface. Check out this video below to get started.

 

The Site Audit tool in SEMRush can scan your website and provide data about all the pages it can crawl. The report it generates will help you identify various technical SEO issues.

Create your project in SEMRush and walk through the configuration steps, then hit “Start Site Audit.”

After the tool crawls your site, it generates an overview of its health using the Site Health metric.

Once you get your Site Health score, you will also get additional windows that provide benchmarking metrics. From there, you can determine what to work on first.

Next, we’ll determine what to prioritize based on your technical SEO audit results.

Crawlability

Structure Your Content and Create a Site Map

If you don’t have an XML sitemap created, this is a great first step in getting your site into optimal shape. Your website’s navigation is the visual representation of your XML sitemap. But in SEO, crawlers read your sitemap to determine the order in which your information is presented to users and search engines.

Your visitors want to find what they’re looking for fast. Otherwise, they’ll bounce on over to your competitor’s website. Create a hierarchy that flows, makes logical sense, and gets visitors to where they want to go—ideally, to where they’ll complete a conversion.

Here’s an example of a well-organized website hierarchy from Google:

Your menu should be simple to navigate and present options a potential buyer would expect.

How to Create and Submit a Sitemap

A sitemap is created in an XML file format. Most content management platforms and many plugins will provide an XML sitemap for you. Yoast, a popular SEO plugin for WordPress sites, provides one automatically. Or you can use Google XML Sitemaps to generate one.

Once your sitemap is downloaded, you must submit it to search engines. To do this in Google, follow these steps:

Sign in to Google Search Console. (GSC)

In the sidebar, select your website.

 

1. Click on ‘Sitemaps.’ The ‘Sitemaps’ menu is under the ‘Index’ section. If you do not see ‘Sitemaps,’ click ‘Index’ to expand the section.

 

 

2. Remove outdated or invalid sitemaps (if any) like sitemap.xml

3. Enter ‘sitemap_index.xml’ in the ‘Add a new sitemap’ field to complete the sitemap URL.

 

 

The same should be done in Bing Webmaster Tools.

4. Click Submit.

Review your website sitemap every month. If you’ve made changes to your site, generate an updated version and re-submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Add Your Sitemap to Your Robots.txt File

You’ll also need to add sitemap locations to your robots.txt file. A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request from your site. Choosing which pages crawlers have access to is also called indexing, covered more extensively below.

Once your sitemap and robots.txt are captured in Google Search Console (GSC), you can manage most aspects of your technical SEO from the GSC dashboard. We highly recommend investing in software such as SEMRush if you plan to conduct monthly SEO audits and maintain your technical SEO site.

In the next section, we will show you how you can create custom workflows to help manage all aspects of your technical SEO. If you are not a technical person who likes to edit backend files, you should hire a reputable SEO agency or a developer to help you.

Understanding Indexing

Once you’ve submitted your sitemap to Google and Bing, search engines will begin indexing your site’s pages so that they appear in search results.

When a search engine like Google indexes your website, it stores and organizes the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a search result for relevant user queries. Example search result for my brand name query:

Ideally, 90% or more of your website should be indexed, but it takes some time for search engines to catch up to newly published pages. That’s why keeping your sitemap and robot.txt files updated is so important.

However, there are also elements of your site you likely don’t want to be indexed, especially anything that could be considered “duplicate content” from what’s already on your site. This might be elements like category pages or cannibalized pages.

Choosing what is and is not indexed on your site will look different for each CMS (WordPress, Squarespace, etc.). Check out their help center for more information.

Use Secure Protocol (HTTPS)

Your website should be using an HTTPS protocol (as opposed to HTTP, which is not encrypted).

An SSL certificate means your site domain appears as a “https://www….” rather than a “http://www….” It demonstrates that your site is secure to viewers.  Here’s more information on how to secure your website. This is what it looks like when you have an SSL:

What’s more, HTTPS is a confirmed Google ranking signal. 

Fixing HTTPS issues isn’t complicated. Again, it will take time to resolve these on your own and may require the assistance of a technical support person. In SEMRush, the HTTPS Implementation report will provide a report on all of the potential issues surrounding certificate registration (1), server support (2), and website architecture (3). Just click on one of the blocks for an explanation of what the issue is and how to fix it.

Errors / Warnings / Notices

You can view the “Errors,” “Warnings,” and “Notices” categories to determine which issues to prioritize.

Common Errors To Prioritize

404 Errors

A 404 error means a visitor is trying to reach a webpage that cannot be found on your site. This most commonly occurs from a broken link, a deleted page without a redirect, etc.

Search engine crawlers flag 404 errors, and they impact usability and trust. No one likes to land on a 404 page, not even a search engine. Run a monthly audit and fix these.

To do so, use Google Search Console. Crawl errors are shown at the site level in the new Index Coverage report (previously the Crawl Errors Report) and the individual URL level in the new URL Inspection tool. These reports help prioritize the severity of the issue and group pages by similar issues to help you find common underlying causes.

Here’s what it looks like in Search Console.

Typically, setting up a 301 redirect will fix a 404 error. In doing this, you’re diverting the traffic from that link to a better one. A 301 redirect is an appropriate solution if you no longer need a page, deleted one, or if an external site is linked to the wrong page. It maps viewers to the page you intended them to visit.

Broken Internal Links

Broken internal links lead users from your website to another page or an external site that doesn’t exist. Multiple broken links negatively affect user experience and may worsen search engine rankings. Crawlers may think that your website is poorly maintained or coded.

To fix this issue, follow all links that are reported as broken.

If a target webpage returns a 404 error, remove the link leading to the error page and then link to another page.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content annoys your visitors and trips up search engine algorithms, causing errors in your SEMRush dashboard. When the spiders find duplicate content, they don’t know which to rank or index, which to give authority to, or if it should be split between them.

Duplicate content can be created in several ways, both intentionally and unintentionally. Either way, it is a problem for good technical SEO. Examples include URL variations, different site versions (www.site.com” and “site.com”), or scraped or copied content. Sometimes, scammy sites will use bots to scrape content and add it to their own, hurting your site.

Find duplicate content with SEMRush’s Site Audit Tool.

In the Dashboard of your initial Site Audit, you will see the Issues tab:

Enter “duplicate” in the search bar above the list of technical issues.

Searching for issues containing the”duplicate” word in the Site Audit tool.

If your domain has duplicate pages, you’ll see a “Why and how to fix it” link in the same line.

Site Audit flags pages as duplicate content if their content is at least 85% identical. It also flags duplicate titles and meta descriptions.

For instance, if many pages use the same keyword, you will want to strategize whether it makes sense to merge this content into one piece or 301 redirect all the duplicates to the most authoritative version.

Another common reason a site has duplicate content is if you have several versions of the same URL.

For example:

• An HTTP version
• An HTTPS version
• A www version
• A non-www version

For Google, these are different versions of the site. So, if your page runs on more than one of these URLs, Google will consider it a duplicate.

To fix this issue, select a preferred version of your site and set up a sitewide 301 redirect. This will ensure only one version of your pages is accessible.

Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Some issues, like duplicate meta titles and descriptions, can be fixed independently, but some may require a more robust content strategy to resolve.

Log in to your web content manager to quickly fix length or missing description warnings for these.

Site Performance

Optimize Your Site Speed

You want a fast website. In the SEO world, “time-to-first-byte” or “TTFB” correlates highly with rankings. It’s when a browser must load the first byte of your web page’s data. You want your TTFB to be low.

Why? Because 40% of people will close a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Further, 47% of polled consumers expect a page to load within two seconds.

Use Google’s Page Speed Tool to see how fast your site loads and runs.

One contributing factor to site speed is fast hosting. Do your research before committing to a host. Here are some ranked hosts for online stores.

Other tactics for optimizing your site’s speed include:

• Use a fast DNS (domain name system) provider like Cloudflare or WordPress.com
• Minimize HTTP requests by keeping scripts and plugins to a minimum.
• Use one CSS stylesheet (the code used to tell a website browser how to display your website) instead of multiple CSS stylesheets or inline CSS.
• Compress your images before uploading them into your CMS.

• Try Google’s Lazy Image Loader.
• Condense any files you upload to your CMS. We like Smush for WordPress.

If you’re not good with website backend files, you’ll likely need some help fixing some of the issues from the diagnostics report.

Use Zapier to Automate Sitespeed Check-ups

You can indirectly monitor your site’s speed by integrating Zapier with other tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom. Zapier can automate periodic site speed checks using these third-party tools and automatically send the results to a spreadsheet, email, or Slack notification. This allows you to track and analyze your site’s performance regularly.

Setting Up Google PageSpeed Insights Monitoring with Zapier:

Create and Connect Accounts:

• • Set up or log in to your Zapier account. Copilot will help you automate; just tell it what you came to do, and it will suggest the best workflow.
  • Ensure you have access to your website URL and Google PageSpeed Insights.

Create a New Zap:

• • In Zapier, select “Create Zap.”
  • Choose a scheduling app like Schedule by Zapier as your trigger.

Configure Trigger:

• • Set the frequency to weekly or monthly for the automated page speed checks.

Set Up Action:

• • Use Zapier’s built-in Webhooks action and choose “GET” request type.
  • Enter the Google PageSpeed Insights API endpoint in the URL field: https://www.googleapis.com/pagespeedonline/v5/runPagespeed?url=YOUR_URL&strategy=desktop (replace YOUR_URL with your site’s URL).
  • Set parameters as needed (you can set “desktop” or “mobile” strategy).

Configure Output:

• • Set the Zap to output results into Google Sheets, Slack, or Email.
  • Customize the message or format to include key metrics such as performance score, load time, and suggestions for improvements.

Test and Activate:

• • Run a test to confirm everything functions correctly.
  • Activate your Zap to begin regular site speed monitoring.

 

Take a Mobile-Friendly and Mobile-First Approach

Considering that more than 50% of web traffic today comes from mobile, it’s fair to say that nearly every website should take a mobile-first approach and be mobile-friendly. That means responsive design, navigation that makes sense in mobile browsers, fast load times, no weird pop-ups on mobile, etc. 

Note that Google sunsetted the mobile usability report in December 2023, and it’s no longer available in Google Search Console, but page speed remains a crucial ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

Lighthouse from Chrome and Google’s Page Speed Insights tool are the most robust resources for evaluating mobile-friendliness. 

If you are not web technical, you will likely need your web developer or designer to help you implement the results of these tools.

Demystifying Page Speed video

AMP

Another way to improve site performance on mobile devices is to use stripped-down versions of your pages called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs).

AMPs load quickly on mobile devices because Google runs them from its cache rather than sending requests to your server.

I’d only recommend implementing AMP on a blog already generating high traffic and seeing a solid conversion rate from that content.  Read more about AMP

Structured Data (Schema Markup)

Use Google’s free tools to create structured data as JSON-LD Markup for your site.

First, go to Structured Data Testing Tool

Then, navigate to the Rich Results test. The official Google tool for testing your structured data to see which Google-rich results can be generated by the structured data on your page. You can also preview how rich results can look in Google Search. Enter your URL to receive your results.

Once you get your results back, you can begin using the Structured Data Markup Helper to create the type of structured data that is right for your website.

Common structured data types include:

• • Local Business Schema: To enhance visibility in local search results.
  • Product Schema: Enhances e-commerce listings with pricing, availability, and review ratings.
  • Article Schema: Provides metadata for blog posts or news articles, including author, publish date, and headline.
  • Event Schema: Highlights events with details such as date, location, and ticket availability.
  • FAQ Schema: Offers structured Q&A formats to enhance visibility in rich snippets.

Once you are at the Structured data markup helper page, you can use the tool to generate the structured data for you!

 

In this example, we generated Local Business markup and will add that to the head section of our HTML. Then, we will go back to the Tool to test.

 

Check Links to Your Site

Depending on what link-building activities you’ve engaged in in the past, you could potentially have some backlinks that are hurting your rankings. Use Google Search Console or SEMRush to run a backlink report. Go through the report and check on any links that look suspicious and try to get them removed. Here’s where to find backlink reports in Google Search Console:

Again, here’s where some additional software could come in handy. If you find a bunch of shady links pointing to your site, you should consider SEMRush to help you manage the process of getting them removed.

More SEO Workflow Automation with Zaps

Automating repetitive SEO tasks streamlines your workflow, saves time, and minimizes errors.

Set Up Zapier Account: Create an account on Zapier and connect the SEO tools you regularly use, such as Google Sheets, SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Google Analytics.

Automate Broken Link Checking:

• • Use Zapier to set up a weekly or monthly automation task with SEMrush.
  • Zapier can automatically trigger an alert in Slack or email with a list of broken links identified in the latest audit.

Create a New Zap:

• • In Zapier, select “Create Zap.”
  • Choose SEMrush as your trigger app.

Configure Trigger:

• • Select the appropriate audit trigger (e.g., “Site Audit Completed”).
  • Set frequency to weekly or monthly.
  • Configure any required options and continue.

Set Up Action:

• • Choose your preferred notification method (email, Slack, Google Sheets).
  • Customize the notification with details like the summary of audit results, including any broken links identified.

Test and Activate:

• • Run a test to ensure everything functions correctly.
  • Activate your Zap to automate future audits.

SEO Content Calendar Automation:

Integrate your content management system (CMS) with Google Calendar via Zapier to automate publishing alerts and deadlines.

Connect Accounts:

• • Sign up or log into your Zapier account.

Create a New Zap:

• • In Zapier, select “Create Zap.”

Configure Trigger:

• • Choose your CMS as the trigger application.
  • Select a trigger event such as “New Post Scheduled” or “Draft Created.”

Set Up Action:

• • Select Google Calendar as your action application.
  • Choose “Create Detailed Event” as the action.

Configure Event Details:

• • Customize event details to include content title, scheduled publish date, URL (if applicable), and any relevant notes.

Test and Activate:

• • Perform a test to verify the correct configuration.
  • Activate your Zap to automate publishing alerts and deadlines.

 

Schedule Audits

About every three months, look at historical site performance (this quarter, the last 12 months, and all-time) to see how the current performance of your content compares to past performance. For the sake of this article, I’m defining performance by visits from organic search and search engine page rankings. If you have numbers that are down for a specific goal or objective, it’s time to dig a little deeper there.

Content auditing on a schedule is essential because catching issues early can mean avoiding significant dips and penalties in search engine rankings. I have included a schedule in the free swipe file below.

The SEO Performance Toolkit: UX + SEO Audit Templates for Smarter Strategy

If you’re ready to take this on for yourself, plus a little something extra, download our The SEO Performance Toolkit: UX + SEO Audit Templates for Smarter Strategy.

👉 Download the toolkit and start optimizing with clarity and confidence.

Final Thoughts

We know we just threw a mountain of information at you. If you have any questions about technical SEO or need help getting your site in shape, contact us anytime.