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Technical SEO audit: what it includes, what it costs and how to check your contractor

A technical audit answers one question: can Google find, read and correctly show the pages of your website? Here is what it includes, what drives the price and how to tell a useful audit from a hundred-page PDF.

Vadym Zakharchuk · Updated 30 October 2026

What a technical audit is, in plain words

Imagine Google as a visitor who walks into every page of your website, reads it and decides whom to show it to. A technical audit checks that nothing gets in this visitor's way: pages open, buttons lead where they should, text and prices are visible, and duplicates don't confuse it.

It is not about copywriting or links from other sites. It is the foundation: while it is broken, everything else works worse — both SEO and paid ads.

What a technical audit includes

A good audit checks the whole site, not just the home page. The main areas:

Can Google reach the pages

  • Status codes. A page should answer "200 — all good". Broken pages (404) and server errors (500) are dead ends for both customers and Google.
  • Broken links and redirects. The "Book now" button leads to a page that no longer exists. Redirect chains slow the site down and confuse search engines.
  • robots.txt and sitemap.xml. The first can accidentally block Google from important sections. The second is the site map without which new pages are discovered slowly.

What Google sees on the page

  • Title and description — the headline and snippet in search results. Without them Google picks a piece of text itself, often a poor one.
  • H1 — the main heading of the page.
  • Canonical — a hint about which of several similar pages is the main one. Without it, duplicates compete with each other.
  • Content after JavaScript. Modern sites often render text and prices with scripts. If a page is empty without JavaScript, Google may see less than your customer does.
  • Structured data — special code Google uses for prices, ratings and addresses. One error in the code and the whole block is ignored.
  • Language versions (hreflang) — so the Ukrainian page is shown to Ukrainian speakers and the English one to English speakers.
  • Social previews — how a link looks when shared in Telegram or Facebook.

Speed and mobile

A slow page loses people before they see the offer. Google also takes speed into account when deciding whom to rank higher.

How an audit differs from an automated report

Online tools produce a report in five minutes: two hundred warnings, half of which don't matter for your site. The owner gets a PDF, doesn't know where to start and puts it off.

A useful audit does three things an automated report doesn't:

  1. Sets priorities. Critical — what costs customers right now. Important — what to fix soon. Tips — when there is time.
  2. Translates into money. Not "404 on 14 URLs" but "the booking button on the home page leads nowhere — and you have already paid for these visitors in ads".
  3. Shows how to check it yourself. Every critical finding can be confirmed without the contractor: open the page, paste the URL into Google's free test.

I check websites with my own tool, Pagelean: it goes through every page with and without JavaScript, then I review the results by hand and write the conclusions in the owner's language.

How much a technical audit costs

The price depends on three things:

  • Site size. A 20-page brochure site and a store with 5,000 products are different amounts of work.
  • Technology. Sites built on JavaScript frameworks need to be checked twice — with and without JavaScript.
  • Whether fixes are included. An audit that ends with a list and an audit that ends with errors fixed and verified are different services.

My "Foundation" package costs 5,000, 7,000 or 9,000 UAH depending on the site size, and it includes not just the audit but fixing the critical errors. You pay after you have verified the result.

5 questions to ask your contractor

  1. How many pages will you check? If the answer is "the home page and a few sections", it is not a site audit.
  2. Do you check pages after JavaScript? For modern sites it is a must.
  3. How do you separate critical from unimportant? A list of two hundred items without priorities shifts the work onto you.
  4. How can I verify your findings myself? A good contractor will show you.
  5. What happens after the fixes? There should be a repeat check showing the errors are gone.

What you can check yourself today

  • Type site:yoursite.com into Google — you'll see how many pages Google knows about and what their titles look like.
  • Paste a page with prices into the Rich Results Test — it shows whether Google can read the structured data.
  • Check speed in PageSpeed Insights — look at the mobile score, most customers come from phones.

If anything here looks odd, that is a reason for a full audit.

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