Technical SEO Audit: The 2026 Playbook

Start with crawlability

Before chasing keywords, make sure Google can crawl and render every page that matters. A single misconfigured robots.txt rule can quietly de-index a whole section.

• Validate robots.txt and XML sitemaps
• Check render-blocking resources
• Audit internal linking depth

Indexation health

Use the Index Coverage report to find crawled — currently not indexed pages. These are usually thin or duplicated.

Rankings are a lagging indicator. Technical health is the leading one.

Core Web Vitals

LCP, INP and CLS are ranking signals and UX signals at once. Fix the field data, not just the lab score.