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The Audit

A technical audit that goes where checklists don't.

The audit is the foundation of every engagement. It's where the actual problems get found. What follows is a breakdown of what gets examined, why each area matters, and what you receive when the work is done.

What Gets Examined

Five areas of investigation

01

Crawl Analysis

Search engines discover your pages by crawling. When that process goes wrong, pages get missed, crawl budget gets wasted on low-value URLs, and important content never gets indexed. The crawl analysis maps exactly how search engines are moving through your site.

Crawl budget assessment

Which URLs are consuming crawl budget without contributing to organic visibility. Pagination sequences, filter parameter URLs, and session ID parameters are common culprits on e-commerce sites.

Robots.txt and directives review

Checking that crawl directives are intentional and not accidentally blocking important pages. Misconfigured robots.txt files are more common than you'd expect.

Redirect chain mapping

Long redirect chains slow crawlers and dilute signals. Every chain gets documented and simplified where possible.

Crawl data visualization showing URL paths and crawl depth mapping on a technical dashboard
Crawl analysis reveals how search engines actually navigate your site.
02

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the most common and most misunderstood problems in e-commerce SEO. It's rarely about copying content from other sites. It's about how your own site generates multiple URLs for the same or very similar content.

Canonical tag audit

Reviewing canonical implementations across product pages, category pages, and paginated sequences. Incorrect or missing canonicals are a frequent source of indexing confusion.

Product variant URL analysis

Color, size, and material variants often generate separate URLs with near-identical content. The audit identifies where this creates duplication issues and how to address them.

Thin content identification

Pages with minimal unique content that may be diluting the overall authority of the site. Common on large catalogs with short product descriptions or auto-generated category pages.

Faceted navigation is examined as part of this analysis on applicable platforms.
03

Site Structure

How your site is organized affects how search engines understand it and how they distribute ranking signals across pages. Flat, logical structures generally perform better than deep, fragmented ones. But the right structure depends on your catalog, not a universal rule.

URL architecture review

Evaluating the URL structure for clarity, depth, and consistency. Deep URL paths and inconsistent naming patterns can create unnecessary complexity.

Internal linking analysis

Mapping how pages link to each other and identifying orphaned pages, over-linked pages, and gaps in internal linking that leave important pages under-supported.

Category and subcategory depth

Reviewing how many clicks it takes to reach important product pages and whether the category hierarchy makes sense for both users and crawlers.

XML sitemap accuracy is reviewed as part of this section.
04

Indexing Health

A page that isn't indexed doesn't rank. But not every page should be indexed. The indexing health review examines what's in Google's index, what's been excluded, and whether those exclusions are intentional or accidental.

Index coverage analysis

Using Search Console data and crawl data together to identify pages that are excluded from the index and understand why. Excluded pages are categorized by cause.

Noindex directive audit

Reviewing where noindex is applied and whether those applications are correct. Noindex on important product or category pages is a straightforward but consequential mistake.

Soft 404 identification

Pages that return a 200 status but present no meaningful content. Common on e-commerce sites when products go out of stock or are discontinued without proper handling.

Hreflang implementation is reviewed for sites with international versions.
05

Schema and Structured Data

Structured data helps search engines understand your content and can enable rich results in search. For e-commerce sites, this is particularly relevant for product pages, which can show price, availability, and review information directly in search results.

Product schema review

Checking that product schema is implemented correctly, includes required properties, and doesn't contain errors that would prevent rich result eligibility.

Breadcrumb markup

Breadcrumb structured data helps search engines understand your site hierarchy and can display the breadcrumb path in search results instead of the URL.

Validation and error checking

Running all structured data through validation to identify errors, warnings, and missing recommended properties that could affect rich result eligibility.

Organization and sitelinks schema are also reviewed where applicable.
What You Receive

The audit deliverable

The audit report is a written document organized by issue area. Each finding includes a description of the issue, an explanation of why it matters for organic visibility, and specific guidance for addressing it.

Findings are prioritized. Not every issue has the same urgency. The report distinguishes between issues that are actively limiting your organic reach and issues that are worth addressing over time. This helps you and your developer allocate effort appropriately.

The report is written to be understood by both non-technical stakeholders and developers. Where technical implementation details are needed, they're included. Where business context is relevant, that's there too.

A walkthrough call is included to go through the findings, answer questions, and discuss implementation priorities.

Detailed SEO audit report document open on a laptop with handwritten notes and priority markings visible
The audit report is structured for both reading and action.

Ready to start with an audit?

The first step is a conversation to scope the engagement appropriately for your site size and platform.