Technical SEO Audit and Core Web Vitals Services

What does a technical SEO audit look at?

Search visibility depends on a chain: Google must find a page, fetch it, understand it, decide to index it and then trust it enough to show it. A technical audit tests each link in that chain. The table below shows the areas we cover and what each one tends to reveal.

The findings column is illustrative of the kinds of problem audits find, not a report on any client.

Why real-user data matters more than a speed score

Google's Core Web Vitals are three measures: Largest Contentful Paint (loading, good at 2.5 seconds or less), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness, good at 200 milliseconds or less) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability, good at 0.1 or less). Per Google's documentation on web.dev, they are assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads, separately for mobile and desktop. INP replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in 2024. These thresholds were checked in November 2026; confirm against Google's current page before relying on them.

The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console uses field data from Chrome real users and groups similar URLs together. When a group has too little data, Google substitutes a broader group, and if nothing is available it says so. That has a practical consequence: a low-traffic site may have no field data to read, and then lab tests are the only evidence available, which we label as such in the report. A lab score can be perfect while real visitors on mid-range phones struggle, which is why we start from the field. Our article on how speed affects SEO and revenue explains why this matters commercially.

What will I actually receive?

The deliverable is a written report, a ranked fix list and a call. The report states each issue in plain language, shows evidence such as example URLs and screenshots from the tools, explains why it matters and says what a correct state looks like. The fix list is a spreadsheet with one row per task: what to change, where, estimated effort, expected benefit and the person best placed to do it. A short summary at the top says which five or six items to start with, so a busy owner can act without reading everything.

How are findings prioritised?

Not every error deserves a ticket. Crawlers will flag thousands of items, and most are noise. We rank each verified issue on three questions:

1. Does it stop search engines reaching or indexing pages that matter? A blocked category or a stray noindex tag goes to the top.
2. How many pages or visitors does it affect? One template fault can touch ten thousand URLs; one broken link touches one.
3. How hard is it to fix? A robots.txt change takes minutes. Rebuilding a rendering approach takes weeks.

High reach and low effort go first. High effort, high reach goes into a planned roadmap. Low reach and high effort is usually recorded and left alone.

What a technical SEO audit cannot do

• Guarantee rankings, traffic or a speed score. Google's own SEO starter guide notes there is no guarantee any particular site will even be indexed. Treat audit-and-promise offers with suspicion, especially those promising a 90-plus score.
• Replace content and links. A technically perfect site with thin pages will not outrank better answers.
• Measure what has not happened yet. A new site has no field data, so audits of new launches rely on lab tests and checklists.
• Fix itself. The audit is a plan. Results come from implementing it.

How does the audit differ by platform?

Shopify. You cannot edit server configuration, so problems usually come from the theme, installed apps and duplicate collection URLs. Fixes happen in theme code, app choices and redirects. See our Shopify speed work.

WordPress and WooCommerce. Plugins, caching, image handling and database bloat are the usual suspects. Our WordPress speed optimization and WordPress and Shopify SEO pages describe the follow-on work.

Laravel and custom builds. Routing, canonical logic, server-side versus client-side rendering and caching headers matter most, and fixes are code changes.

Where do AI crawlers and llms.txt fit?

As a modern add-on, we check whether your robots.txt accidentally blocks AI assistants' crawlers and whether your key facts are in readable text rather than hidden behind scripts. Each AI vendor publishes its own crawler names and rules, so we read the current vendor documents during the audit. An llms.txt file is optional; our explainer on llms.txt covers what is known. Wider work on appearing in AI answers sits under GEO and AI search visibility.

What do we need from you to start?

Read-only access to Search Console and your analytics, a list of the pages and markets that matter most, and a note of anything that changed recently, such as a redesign, a platform move or a plugin swap. Dates matter, because a drop that begins on the day a new theme went live points to a different cause than a slow decline. If the site has a staging copy, we use it for the code-level checks. If you have previous audit reports or developer notes, send them, since they save time and show which fixes were already tried.

Audit, one-off fixes or a monthly SEO plan?

Choose the audit when you do not know what is wrong, after a migration or redesign, or before spending on content. Choose fixes when the audit has produced a list. Choose an ongoing plan, such as those on our subscriptions page, when you need steady work after the foundation is sound. Not sure which? Run the cost estimator or ask us directly.