technical-seo-auditlisted

# Technical SEO Audit Content problems are expensive to fix and slow to pay off. Technical problems are usually cheap to fix and pay off immediately. Audit in that order. The purpose of this audit isn't a 90-page PDF. It's a short list of things that are broken, ordered by how much traffic each one costs, with the fix written out. ## The order of operations Work top to bottom. A failure at any level makes everything below it irrelevant, so never optimise a title tag on a page that returns a 404 to Googlebot. ``` 1. Can it be reached? DNS, TLS, server response, uptime 2. Can it be crawled? robots.txt, status codes, redirect chains, crawl traps 3. Can it be rendered? JS execution, hydration, content in the initial HTML 4. Can it be indexed? noindex, canonicals, duplicates, thin pages 5. Can it be understood? headings, structured data, internal links, entities 6. Is it pleasant to use? Core Web Vitals, mobile layout, interstitials ``` Report findings in this order too. It reads as a diagnosis rather than a list of complaints. ## Step 1: Establish what's actually happening Before touching anything, get the ground truth. Guessing at this stage produces confident nonsense. - **Fetch the page as a bot.** Check the final status, the full redirect chain and the `x-robots-tag` header: ```bash curl -sIL -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" https://example.com/page ``` - **Read the raw HTML, not the DOM.** If the c