A comprehensive technical SEO audit for enterprise websites requires systematic examination of hundreds of elements. This 200+ item checklist covers every aspect from crawling to performance.
Priority System
- Critical: Directly impacts indexation or rankings
- Important: Affects crawl efficiency or user experience
- Nice to have: Optimization opportunities
1. Crawlability (30 Items)
- Critical: Robots.txt exists and is accessible
- Critical: No important pages blocked by robots.txt
- Critical: Sitemap URL declared in robots.txt
- Critical: Googlebot can access all important pages
- Critical: All pages reachable within 4 clicks from homepage
- Critical: No orphan pages
- Important: Logical URL structure
- Important: HTML sitemap exists
- Critical: XML sitemap exists and submitted to GSC
- Critical: Only canonical URLs in sitemap
- Important: Sitemap split by content type
- Critical: No broken internal links
- Important: Anchor text is descriptive
2. Indexation (25 Items)
- Critical: Canonical tags on all pages
- Critical: Canonical URLs point correctly
- Critical: No conflicting canonical and hreflang
- Critical: No important pages with noindex
- Critical: No duplicate content
- Critical: WWW/non-WWW resolves to one version
- Critical: HTTP/HTTPS redirects properly
- Important: Monitor index coverage in GSC
3. URL Structure (20 Items)
- Critical: URLs use HTTPS
- Critical: No parameters in canonical URLs
- Critical: URLs are lowercase with hyphens
- Important: URLs under 75 characters
- Important: URLs include target keywords
4. On-Page Technical (35 Items)
- Critical: Every page has unique title tag (30-60 chars)
- Critical: Every page has unique meta description (120-160 chars)
- Critical: Every page has exactly one H1
- Critical: All images have alt text
- Critical: Schema markup validates without errors
- Important: FAQ schema for question-based content
- Important: Breadcrumb schema implemented
5. Performance (30 Items)
- Critical: LCP under 2.5 seconds
- Critical: INP under 200 milliseconds
- Critical: CLS under 0.1
- Critical: TTFB under 800ms
- Important: HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 enabled
- Important: Compression enabled
- Important: CDN configured correctly
- Important: Total page weight under 3MB
6. Mobile (25 Items)
- Critical: Mobile-friendly design
- Critical: No mobile-specific errors in GSC
- Critical: Touch targets at least 48px
- Important: Responsive design
- Important: Mobile viewport meta tag present
7. International (20 Items)
- Critical: Hreflang tags implemented correctly
- Critical: Hreflang includes self-referencing tag
- Critical: Hreflang is bidirectional
- Important: x-default hreflang specified
8. Security (15 Items)
- Critical: Valid SSL certificate
- Critical: Mixed content resolved
- Important: Security headers present
Automated Audit
def run_technical_audit(site_url):
results = {
## Frequently asked questions
**How is an enterprise technical audit different from a small-site one?** Scale changes the problems. At hundreds of thousands of URLs you're managing crawl budget, log-file analysis, faceted-navigation duplication, and internationalization (hreflang) — issues a small site never hits. The checklist gets longer because the failure modes multiply.
**How often should an enterprise site run a technical audit?** Continuous monitoring plus a deep quarterly audit. Large sites change daily through deploys and content ops, so a once-a-year audit misses regressions that cost real traffic.
**What tools handle a technical audit at enterprise scale?** A log-file analyzer, an enterprise crawler (Screaming Frog in database mode, Sitebulb, or a cloud crawler), Search Console, and a way to diff crawls over time. Manual spot-checks don't scale past a few thousand URLs.
**Where should a large team start?** Crawl budget and indexation. On big sites the highest-impact wins are usually getting Google to spend its crawl on pages that matter and to stop wasting it on infinite parameter and faceted URLs.