Technical SEO Audit: Spotting and Fixing Hidden Website Issues

Many business owners assume that once their site is live and content is published, Google will do the rest. In reality, hidden technical issues—crawl errors, sluggish page-speed, and indexing gaps—can leave revenue-generating pages invisible. A technical SEO audit surfaces these roadblocks, quantifies their business impact, and provides a fix-list that lifts rankings and conversions. This post shows you how to:

1. Detect crawl-errors that waste crawl budget and remove them fast.
   
2. Trim every wasted millisecond from page-load and meet 2024 Core Web Vitals thresholds.
   
3. Solve “crawled – currently not indexed,” canonical and duplicate-content traps that stall indexation.
   Finally, you’ll see a step-by-step audit framework and learn where to get expert help if you’d rather focus on running your business.

Why technical SEO still wins clients in 2025

Search is the #1 purchase driver for B2B and B2C alike, yet Google will not rank what it cannot crawl, render, or index. Google’s own documentation notes that crawl budget—the “time and resources Google devotes to crawling a site”—is finite and influenced by server health and perceived content value. A comprehensive audit uncovers anything that silently burns that budget before your money pages are even seen.

Crawl errors: find them, fix them, free your budget

• Server-side 5xx errors throttle Googlebot. Search Engine Land’s March 2025 guide confirms that recurrent 5xx responses prompt Google to “slow a website’s crawling rate,” and URLs with persistent errors may be dropped from the index.
  
• Crawl Stats is your early-warning radar. In Search Console, the Crawl Stats report surfaces spikes in 5xx errors, response-time surges, and robots.txt blocks that tell Googlebot to back off.
  
• Action plan.
  
  1. Open Settings → Crawl Stats; export the last 90 days.
     
  2. Prioritise any host with >1% 5xx errors or avg. response >500 ms.
     
  3. Patch server misconfigurations, review firewall rules, and request a recrawl.
     

Site-speed: the silent conversion killer

Slow pages hurt twice—fewer crawls and lost customers. Independent studies back this up:

• A mere 0.1-second improvement on mobile lifts conversions 8.4%..
  
• Portent’s analysis of 27k landing pages found sites that load in 1 s convert 3× better than those that load in 5s.
  

Meet 2024’s Core Web Vitals thresholds

Google upgraded Interaction to Next Paint (INP) to replace First Input Delay on 12 March 2024, making real-world interactivity a ranking signal. Audit checklist:

Metric	Threshold	Quick wins
INP	≤200 ms	Reduce long JS tasks, break oversized CSS
LCP	≤2.5 s	Serve responsive images, lazy-load below-fold assets
CLS	≤0.1	Include size attributes, avoid layout-shifting ads

Run PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and Real-User-Monitoring (RUM) to capture lab and field data, then fix the pages that fail at the 75th-percentile.

Indexing problems: from “crawled – not indexed” to rogue canonicals

Even after a clean crawl and fast load, pages can still fail to index.

• “Crawled – currently not indexed.” Onely’s 2024 guide recommends auditing thin or duplicate pages, strengthening internal links, and (if all else fails) submitting a temporary sitemap for high-value URLs.
  
• Canonical chains and conflicts. Mis-pointing canonical tags create unnecessary duplicates and sap crawl budget; a 2024 canonical-URL guide stresses using a single, self-referencing canonical per page.
  
• Action plan.
  
  1. Open Search Console → Pages → “Crawled – currently not indexed.”
     
  2. Group URLs by template; enrich or merge thin content.
     
  3. Validate canonical tags with Screaming Frog (Report → Canonicals → errant chains).
     
  4. Re-submit fixed URLs via URL Inspection.
     

A 7-step technical audit framework for busy business owners

1. Baseline crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb—export all 4xx/5xx URLs.
   
2. Core Web Vitals lab test with Lighthouse; capture INP, LCP, CLS.
   
3. Field data via CrUX or RUM to validate real user impact.
   
4. Index coverage diagnostics in Search Console.
   
5. Log-file sampling to see what Googlebot actually fetches.
   
6. Prioritise fixes by revenue potential (start with indexable, high-intent pages).
   
7. Monitor & iterate: compare Crawl Stats and Core Web Vitals monthly.
   

Bottom-line

Every millisecond shaved and every crawl error squashed is reclaimed revenue potential. Don’t let hidden technical snags eat your marketing budget.

If you’d rather focus on running your business while these fixes get done right, schedule a complimentary 30-minute marketing audit with EDMC today. Or, reach out and let’s uncover the quick wins hiding in your code before your competitors do.