A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines and AI crawlers can actually access, read, and understand a site. Here's what it actually covers.
A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines and AI crawlers can actually access, crawl, index, and correctly understand a website, covering crawlability, site speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, structured data, and URL and site architecture. It's the foundational layer underneath content and keyword strategy, a site with strong content but broken technical fundamentals will consistently underperform its potential, regardless of how good the writing is.
Crawlability and indexing. Whether robots.txt is correctly configured, whether important pages are actually being indexed, and whether crawl errors are blocking search engines or AI crawlers from accessing key content.
Site speed and Core Web Vitals. Google's page experience metrics, loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability, which affect both user experience and, to a documented degree, ranking.
Mobile usability. Since Google indexes primarily based on the mobile version of a site, mobile-specific issues, broken layouts, unreadable text, blocked resources, carry outsized weight.
Structured data. Whether schema markup accurately reflects what's on the page, covering the relevant types for the business, Article, Organization, Product, FAQPage, and others depending on the site.
URL structure and site architecture. Whether the site's structure is logical and crawlable, with a sensible internal linking pattern that helps both search engines and visitors understand how content relates to other content on the site.
Duplicate content and canonicalization. Whether multiple URLs are unintentionally competing for the same content, diluting ranking signal rather than consolidating it.
AI crawler accessibility. Increasingly relevant alongside traditional technical SEO: whether AI crawlers can access and correctly parse the site's content, covered in more depth in how to structure content so AI search engines cite it.
A few technical considerations come up more often for sites serving a Netherlands or broader European audience specifically: correct hreflang implementation for any English/Dutch bilingual content, ensuring server location and CDN setup don't create unnecessary latency for European visitors, and making sure structured data and metadata are correctly localized rather than a direct, untranslated copy of English-language markup.
A useful technical audit doesn't just list every issue found, it prioritizes them by actual impact. A minor structured data warning and a robots.txt error blocking the homepage from being crawled are not the same severity, even though both might appear on a generic audit tool's output. The value of a properly done audit is in that prioritization, what to fix first, and why, not just a long list of flagged issues copied from a scanning tool.
This is part of AI Search & SEO. See the underlying approach applied directly in AI visibility: from invisible to citable.
Want an honest read on where your own site's technical foundations stand? Get in touch.