Technical SEO Explained: The Audit Checklist for SA Sites

Technical SEO is the foundation everything else sits on. You can publish brilliant pages and earn strong links, but if search engines struggle to crawl, index or render your site, those efforts are wasted. A technical SEO audit is a systematic check of that foundation. This article explains what technical SEO is, then walks through a full audit checklist in the order you should tackle it, with the tools for each step.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the work that makes a website easy for search engines to crawl, index and render, so its content can rank. Where content and off-page SEO are about what you say and who links to you, technical SEO is about the plumbing: how fast pages load, whether they are mobile-friendly, whether bots can reach them, and whether the markup tells search engines what each page is. Get the plumbing wrong and even the best content underperforms.

A technical SEO audit is the structured review that finds those problems. It crawls the site the way a search engine would, checks how Google is actually treating your pages, measures performance, and produces a prioritised list of fixes. The checklist below covers the eight areas every audit should include.

1. Crawlability and indexing

Start here, because if a page cannot be crawled or indexed, no other optimisation can help it. Open Google Search Console and check the Pages report under Indexing. It tells you exactly which URLs are indexed and, more usefully, which are excluded and why.

• Confirm important pages are indexed; investigate anything marked “Crawled – currently not indexed” or “Discovered – currently not indexed”
• Check that robots.txt is not blocking pages, scripts or CSS that need crawling
• Look for accidental noindex tags left over from staging or development
• Make sure the site is reachable from the homepage within a few clicks; orphan pages with no internal links rarely get crawled
• Watch crawl budget on large sites: thin, duplicate or parameter URLs waste it

Use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to see how Google last crawled and rendered a specific page, and to request indexing after a fix.

2. Site speed and Core Web Vitals

Speed is both a ranking signal and a conversion factor, and it matters more in South Africa where many users are on mobile data and variable network speeds. Google measures real-world performance through three Core Web Vitals.

Run PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse on your key templates (home, a service page, a blog post, a product page). Common fixes: compress and correctly size images, serve modern formats like WebP, defer non-critical JavaScript, set explicit width and height on images and embeds to stop layout shift, and enable caching and a CDN. South African sites should also confirm hosting is geographically sensible or fronted by a CDN with local edge nodes.

3. Mobile usability and HTTPS

Google indexes the mobile version of your site first, so the mobile experience is the experience that ranks. Check that text is readable without zooming, tap targets are not cramped, and nothing overflows the viewport. Lighthouse and the mobile view in Chrome DevTools both flag these issues quickly.

HTTPS and security

Every page should load over HTTPS with a valid certificate. Audit for:

• A valid, non-expired SSL certificate covering all subdomains you use
• No mixed content warnings (HTTP images, scripts or styles loaded on an HTTPS page)
• A single canonical version of the site: pick HTTP or HTTPS, and www or non-www, then 301 redirect the rest
• HSTS enabled where appropriate to force secure connections

4. Structured data, sitemaps and robots.txt

Structured data (schema markup) tells search engines what your content means, and can earn rich results in the SERP. Common types include Organisation, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList, Article, Product and FAQPage, and clean structured data also helps with AI search optimisation as engines increasingly cite well-marked-up pages. Validate your markup with the Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator, and fix any errors or missing required fields.

XML sitemaps

• Maintain an up-to-date XML sitemap listing only canonical, indexable URLs
• Exclude noindex, redirected and 404 URLs from the sitemap
• Submit the sitemap in Search Console and check it is being read without errors

robots.txt

Confirm robots.txt allows crawling of content and assets, blocks only what genuinely should be hidden (admin paths, internal search results), and references the sitemap location. A single overly broad Disallow rule can deindex an entire site, so review this carefully.

5. Canonicals and broken links

Canonical tags tell search engines which version of a page is the authoritative one, and broken links waste crawl budget and frustrate users. Crawl the site with a tool like Screaming Frog and check:

• Every page has a self-referencing canonical unless it deliberately points elsewhere
• No conflicting signals, such as a canonical pointing to a noindexed or redirected URL
• No duplicate title tags or meta descriptions, which usually signal duplicate or thin pages
• Internal 404s are fixed or redirected; broken internal links leak ranking signals
• Redirect chains and loops are collapsed to a single 301 hop

Redirect chains are easy to accumulate over a site’s life and slow to surface, which is why a crawl-based audit catches them where a manual review does not.

“Most South African sites we audit are not penalised, they are just leaking. A handful of noindexed pages, a slow mobile homepage and a few hundred internal redirects add up to traffic the business never sees. Technical SEO is unglamorous, but fixing the foundations usually moves rankings faster than writing more content.”

— Cobus van der Westhuizen, Founder & Digital Strategist, Juicy Designs — reviewed and verified June 2026

A technical SEO audit checks eight areas: crawlability and indexing, site speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, HTTPS, structured data, XML sitemaps and robots.txt, canonical tags, and broken links. Core Web Vitals thresholds: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. The essential tools are Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, the Rich Results Test, the Schema Markup Validator and a crawler such as Screaming Frog. Audit at least twice a year and after any migration. Source: Juicy Designs, founder-led SA agency since 2015.

Tools to use for a technical SEO audit

You can run a thorough technical SEO audit with free tools; paid platforms add scheduling and history. Here is the practical toolkit.

Work through the checklist in order and you will catch the issues that suppress most South African sites: pages Google cannot index, slow mobile loading, broken internal links and invalid schema. Fix the highest-impact items first, then re-crawl to confirm. If you would rather have it done for you, Juicy Designs runs technical SEO audits from R3,500, including a prioritised fix list, and you can see how that fits alongside our other work on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions