How to Conduct an Effective SEO Audit with SEOWrench

A technical SEO audit exists to answer three questions: how the site is doing, what is wrong and what to fix first. Almost every tool answers the second one well. The third is the one that decides whether the audit turns into finished work or into a PDF forgotten in a folder.

The problem with a bad audit is not that it finds too little. It is that it finds everything, all with the same weight. A list of three hundred warnings, where a missing favicon sits next to the main page being out of Google, pushes the reader toward fixing what is easy instead of what matters.

This guide is the process we recommend, from start to finish, with SEOWrench and with Google's free tools. It works for your own site and for a client's.

Before you start: what a technical audit looks at

A technical audit looks at whatever stops the search engine from reaching, reading and keeping your pages. That includes the server response, indexing, the canonical, the title and description, the headings, HTTPS, mobile, structured data and readability for AI. If any of those terms is new to you, the guide on what technical SEO is goes through each one, with a way to check it.

It does not look at the quality of the writing, your position for each keyword, or how many sites link to you. Those questions matter, but they have other tools, and they come up at the end of this guide.

Step 1: decide what you are auditing

It sounds obvious, and it is where many audits start off crooked.

One domain at a time. A blog on a subdomain and a store on another are different sites to a search engine, and deserve separate audits.
Production only. Auditing the staging version gives you staging results. If staging is open to the internet, that is already a finding: it should be out of the index.
Know which pages pay the bills. The product page that sells, the service page that brings in leads, the post that attracts visits. When it is time to prioritize, a problem on those pages outweighs the same problem on a page nobody visits.

Write down that short list of important pages before you run anything. It will be your tiebreaker in step 4.

Step 2: make sure the bot can get in

An automated audit is a bot visiting your site. If the site turns bots away, the audit will say everything is broken, and the site is not to blame.

Three things to check first:

The robots.txt. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure it does not block the whole site with a forgotten Disallow: /.
The firewall and bot protection. Some security services block any visitor that is not a regular browser. If the audit comes back with every page failing, this is the first place to look.
The staging noindex. A site that leaves testing with noindex still on disappears from Google entirely. When that happens across the whole site, SEOWrench shows the warning at the top of the result, ahead of every other finding, because until it is fixed nothing else matters.

Step 3: run the audit

How you run it depends on how big the question is.

One page, no account. The free check reviews the page you paste in seconds, with technical SEO and AI readiness. It is the right way to check one specific page, or to see whether a fix worked.
The start of the site, with the free account. The free account audits up to 5 pages per scan. It is enough to diagnose the home page and the main pages.
The whole site, with Pro. Pro reads the sitemap and follows internal links, up to 100 pages per audit. This is where the problems that live far from the home page show up: the old page returning an error, the forgotten post with no canonical, the internal link that lands on a redirect.

While the audit runs, leave the site alone. A fix made in the middle of a scan produces a result that mixes before and after.

Step 4: read it in the right order

This is where the audit pays off or does not. SEOWrench sorts every finding into three severity levels, and each level calls for a different response.

Level	What it means	What to do
Critical	stops the page from being found or read	fix it before anything else
Warning	gets in the way, but the page still works	fix it next, starting with the important pages
Opportunity	the page works and could be better	fix it once the first two are clean

The result opens with a block called "Start here", which is the direct answer to the third question: what to fix first. Read that block before the full list.

In the list, cross the severity with your list of important pages from step 1. The order that pays off most is:

Critical issues on the important pages.
Critical issues on the rest of the site.
Warnings on the important pages.
Everything else.

One detail changes how you read it: almost every technical problem repeats by page template. If a blog post has no canonical, chances are no post has one, because they all come from the same template. When the same finding shows up on many pages, the fix is usually a single one, in the template, not one per page. That turns a list that looked huge into a list of half a dozen fixes.

Step 5: set aside what is intentional

Not every finding is a defect. A login page with noindex is correct, because it should not appear in search. So is the thank-you page after a form. If those findings stay on the list, they clutter the reading and hide the real problems.

SEOWrench already takes pages marked noindex out of the score on its own, and shows them apart, as ignored. For everything else, each finding has a "Mark as intentional" option. The finding leaves the score and the to-do list, and stays on record, so that whoever opens the report later understands it was a decision and not an oversight.

Use it with judgment. Marking as intentional a problem you simply do not want to fix right now is hiding the debt.

Step 6: fix it, and write down what changed

With the short list in hand, the fixing is the job of whoever runs the site. A few tips that save rework:

One fix at a time, when you can. If three changes ship together and something breaks, you do not know which one did it.
Start with the template, not the page. Back to step 4: title, canonical and headings almost always live in the template.
Be careful with redirects. A page that changed address gets a 301 to the new one, and internal links start pointing straight at the destination. The post on internal links that redirect shows what that really costs.
Write down the date of each change. When Search Console shows a swing three weeks from now, you will want to know what changed on that day.

Step 7: run it again and compare

A fix nobody checked is a presumed fix. After the changes go live, run the audit again.

For one specific page, the free check answers in seconds, and it is the fastest way to confirm that the noindex is gone or that the new title is live.
For the site, run the full audit. SEOWrench shows how the score moved against the previous audit, and comparing the two shows what was resolved, what persists and what is new.

"What is new" deserves attention. A fix to a template sometimes breaks something else in the same template, and the second audit is the place to catch it.

Step 8: deliver the result

If the audit is for a client or another team, it has to leave the screen. On Pro, the report exports to CSV and PDF. On Agency, the PDF carries your agency's brand, with no mention of SEOWrench.

A report that works for its reader has, in this order:

The score, and how it moved since the last audit.
The critical issues, with the page and the fix.
What was resolved since last time.
What was marked as intentional, and why.

Avoid promising search results in the report. The audit measures the technical state of the site. Position and traffic also depend on content, competition and time, and no technical tool can guarantee them.

What a technical audit does not show

An honest audit says what it does not cover. SEOWrench does not cover everything either, and these are the gaps you need to fill with another tool:

Core Web Vitals. SEOWrench measures server response time and HTML size, but it does not measure LCP, INP and CLS. For those, use PageSpeed Insights and the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.
Position, clicks and impressions. Only Search Console has those numbers for your site.
Links from other sites to yours. The Links report in Search Console is the free starting point.
The quality of the content. A page can be technically perfect and still not answer what the person was looking for.

Readability for AI is a separate case. SEOWrench checks whether the content is readable without JavaScript and whether robots.txt blocks the AI search bots, which are the two things that most decide whether ChatGPT and Perplexity can read the page. The method is explained in how SEOWrench measures GEO. What it does not do, and what nobody can honestly do, is promise that an AI will cite your site.

The most common mistakes

Fixing in list order instead of by severity. The first item on the list is not always the most important one.
Fixing page by page what belongs to the template. It takes ten times the work and leaves new pages with the same defect.
Not running it again. The fix may not have shipped, or it may have broken something else.
Auditing once and forgetting. Sites change. A plugin updates, someone edits a template, a new page goes live with no canonical. An audit a month catches the problem before Google does.
Treating the score as the goal. The score sums up the technical state. The goal is for the site to be found, read and kept. A high score with the main page out of the index is worth nothing.

If you want to go deeper into the part that repeats most across sites, how pages and links are organized, the guide on site architecture for SEO has its own checklist.

Where to start today

If you only have five minutes, paste the most important page of your site into the SEOWrench free check. It needs no account, and it shows in seconds whether there is anything critical. If there is, you already know what to fix first.