A first-week technical SEO audit, in the order that matters
The checks to run before touching anything on a new site, in the order that stops you wasting a week on the wrong problem.
· 3 min read
Most audit templates are a list of 120 checks with no order. You run them all, hand over a spreadsheet, and the client fixes the three easiest items. Nothing changes.
The order matters more than the list, because each stage decides whether the next one is worth doing. Here's the sequence we suggest for the first week on a new site.
1. Can search engines reach the pages?
Start with robots.txt and the sitemap, not with a crawl. Read robots.txt line by line. Staging rules shipped to production are a classic, and a single Disallow: / undoes everything else in this article.
Then open the XML sitemap. Does it list the pages you actually care about? Does it include redirects, 404s or parameters? A sitemap full of junk tells you something about the CMS before you crawl a single URL.
2. Is what they reach being indexed?
In Search Console, open Pages and read the excluded reasons from the top. "Crawled, currently not indexed" on a handful of thin pages is normal; the same label on your main category pages is a business problem.
Compare indexed pages against the number of pages that should exist. Order-of-magnitude gaps point at the cause: ten times too many usually means parameters or faceted navigation; ten times too few usually means blocked, duplicated or paginated content.
3. Does the page render without the user doing anything?
Open your top landing pages in a private window on a phone, with no cookies. Then do the same in the URL Inspection tool and look at the rendered HTML.
You're looking for content that only appears after a click, consent banners that block everything, and text that never makes it into the HTML. If the main content isn't in the rendered page, nothing further down this list will help.
4. Is it fast enough on a real phone?
Use field data (Search Console's Core Web Vitals report, or the Chrome UX report) before lab tools. Lab scores describe a machine in a data centre; field data describes your visitors.
Fix the largest, dumbest things first: unoptimised hero images, render-blocking scripts, fonts loading late. Micro-optimisation before those is wasted effort.
5. Only now, look at the content
With crawling, indexing, rendering and speed understood, content problems become visible: pages competing for the same query, categories with no text, product pages copied from the manufacturer.
This is also when deletion becomes an option. Pages that have had no clicks and no impressions for a year are not "potential"; they're maintenance.
What to hand over
One page, not a spreadsheet:
- What's broken, in plain language.
- What it costs, in traffic or revenue terms where you can estimate it honestly.
- Three things to fix this month, with who has to do them.
The spreadsheet can be an appendix. Decisions get made from the one-pager.
What's in your first week that isn't here? Tell us in the comments.