# technical-seo-audit

Technical SEO Audit


Overview
Technical SEO Audit is the skill of checking whether your site can actually be crawled, indexed, understood, and shared correctly before you spend more time writing content. For a one-person company, this is the minimum viable search hygiene layer. If canonicals are wrong, redirects are sloppy, thumbnails are missing, or metadata is inconsistent, good pages still underperform.

When to Use This Skill
Use this before a launch, after a redesign, when traffic stalls despite publishing, when social shares look broken, or when search pages are live but feel structurally weak.

What This Skill Does
This skill gives you a fast technical audit for the pages that matter most. It checks crawl access, indexability, canonical consistency, redirects, metadata, thumbnails, schema basics, and route hygiene. The output should tell you what blocks discovery, what weakens click-through, and what makes pages less citation-worthy in AI search.

How to Use
Step 1: Check crawl and index basics. Confirm `robots.txt` is reachable, `sitemap.xml` exists, important pages return `200`, and there is no accidental `noindex` or canonical conflict.
Step 2: Check canonical discipline. Every important page should have one clean canonical URL. Old traffic paths should redirect to the right live page instead of falling back to the homepage.
Step 3: Check metadata coverage. Homepage, category pages, and top skill pages all need a clear `<title>`, meta description, canonical tag, Open Graph title/description/image, and Twitter card/image.
Step 4: Check thumbnail readiness. Shared pages should resolve to a large image that matches the current design system. Missing or off-brand thumbnails reduce click-through and make the site look unfinished.
Step 5: Check structured data sanity. Core pages should have clean schema that matches the visible page purpose. Do not add noisy markup that contradicts the content.
Step 6: Check mobile-safe rendering. Important pages should not rely on desktop-only layouts, broken assets, or unreadable content blocks.
Step 7: Prioritize fixes by impact. First fix crawl/index blockers, then canonical and redirect issues, then metadata and thumbnail gaps, then polish.

Output
The output should include:
A blocker list by severity
Affected URLs or patterns
The fix recommendation
Whether the issue hurts crawl, indexing, click-through, or answer-engine citation potential

What Good Looks Like
A healthy one-person-company site has:
One canonical URL per page
Clean redirects from legacy paths
Consistent title and description coverage
Working `og:image` and `twitter:image` on homepage, library, and top skill pages
Schema that reinforces the page instead of decorating it

Common Mistakes
Do not treat technical SEO as a giant enterprise checklist.
Do not let old URLs dump traffic onto the homepage.
Do not publish pages that have no usable social thumbnail.
Do not assume sitemap presence means the page is healthy.
Do not keep creating new pages while core routes still have metadata gaps.