Technical SEO Audit Checklist and Template for Indian Websites (2026)

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser and read it line by line. The single most common serious fault I find is a rule block with no valid User-agent line above it — often because someone commented it out while testing and never restored it. Every rule below an invalid or missing user-agent declaration belongs to no crawler group, and the file effectively does nothing.

Check for the opposite failure too: a Disallow: / left over from a staging site, which blocks everything. Then confirm the file actually exists on the server. On many hosts a plugin’s robots.txt editor will happily save a file that is never served, because a physical file on disk takes priority. Test by loading the URL, not by trusting the plugin.

• Valid User-agent: * group, not commented out
• Admin, login and system paths disallowed; CSS and JS explicitly allowed so Google can render pages
• Internal search results and tracking parameters disallowed to protect crawl budget
• Sitemap declared with its absolute URL
• Server returns 200 for the file and it is plain text

Compare three numbers: URLs in your XML sitemap, pages reported as indexed in Google Search Console, and pages you actually want ranking. On a healthy small business site those numbers are close. When the sitemap has thirty-four URLs and the business has eighteen real pages, the difference is usually archives, tag pages, attachment pages and duplicates quietly competing with the pages that matter.

• Date, tag and author archives noindexed or disabled unless they earn traffic
• Empty or near-empty category archives noindexed and removed from the sitemap
• Attachment and media pages redirected to the file or disabled
• Search results pages noindexed
• Every URL in the sitemap returns 200 and is self-canonical — a sitemap should never contain a redirect or a noindexed page
• 404 page returns a genuine 404 status and carries noindex

Every page on a WordPress site can usually be reached at four addresses: with and without www, over HTTP and HTTPS, with and without a trailing slash, and often with an index.php or query-string variant on top. Google will pick one, but you want to make the choice for it.

Test each variant by hand and watch where it lands. All of them should end on the same canonical URL with a single 301 — not a chain of two or three. Then check that the rel=canonical tag on the page points at itself, not at the homepage, and not at a variant.

Redirects are not the problem; internal links pointing at redirects are. If your blog listing links to eleven old posts that all 301 somewhere else, Google spends its crawl allowance following hops instead of reading new content, and each hop leaks a little authority.

• Crawl the site and list every internal link whose destination is not a 200
• Update those links to point at the final URL
• Collapse redirect chains to a single hop
• Check for orphan directories sitting outside the CMS — a leftover folder on the server can shadow a real page and serve a host’s default placeholder with a 200 status

Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever most sites never pull. A blog post with one internal link, pointing at the homepage, tells Google almost nothing about what the site is for. Ten contextual links into the relevant service pages tell it a great deal.

• Every money page reachable within three clicks of the homepage
• Each article links contextually to at least two service pages and two related articles
• Anchor text descriptive rather than “click here”
• No page with zero internal links pointing to it
• Pagination either handled properly or eliminated — a paginated URL that shows the same posts as page one is duplicate content

Audit these in bulk rather than page by page. Export every indexable URL and check the same fields across all of them; the failures cluster.

Schema will not make a bad page rank, but it makes a good page legible to search engines and to AI answer systems, which increasingly decide what to quote based on what they can parse confidently.

• Organization or LocalBusiness on the site, with consistent name, phone and address
• BreadcrumbList on every page
• Article with a real author Person on every post — and the same Person entity reused site-wide, with sameAs pointing at profiles that confirm the identity
• Service or Product schema on commercial pages
• FAQPage only where visible questions and answers genuinely exist on the page
• Every JSON-LD block parses without error, and no two blocks contradict each other

Test on a mid-range Android phone on mobile data, not on your laptop. In India that is what most of your traffic actually is. The three metrics that matter are largest contentful paint, interaction to next paint and cumulative layout shift.

• Hero image compressed, correctly sized and preloaded; everything below the fold lazy-loaded
• Width and height set on every image so the layout does not jump
• Unused plugin CSS and JS dequeued from pages that do not need them
• Fonts served with display=swap and preconnected
• Page caching on, with a purge that actually runs when content changes
• A single accumulated stylesheet, not forty layers of overrides added over time

For any business serving a specific city, this layer often moves rankings faster than anything on the site itself. Name, address and phone number must match exactly across the website, the Google Business Profile and every directory listing. Inconsistency here is why businesses with good sites still miss the map pack. Our branding and local SEO work starts with exactly this reconciliation.

Google Search Console is non-negotiable and free — coverage, page indexing and Core Web Vitals reports are the ground truth. PageSpeed Insights for field data. Any crawler for the site-wide sweep. A schema validator for structured data. Paid tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush help with keywords and links, but no paid tool tells you anything about your own site that Search Console will not.

Use this template to record each check as you run the audit. Copy the table into Google Sheets or Excel, mark every row Pass or Fix, give each fix a priority, and work through High items first. Re-run the same template after fixes go live so you can show what changed.

Layers 1 to 5: crawl, index and site structure

Layers 6 to 9: on-page, schema, speed and local

Want this done for you? Our SEO services start with exactly this audit, or request a free technical SEO audit. For online stores, pair it with our e-commerce SEO guide; if the site gets traffic but no enquiries, see why websites fail to generate leads.

A full audit twice a year for a small site, quarterly if you publish weekly, and immediately after any migration, redesign, plugin change or hosting move. Between audits, check Search Console’s page indexing report monthly — it is the early warning system for everything on this list. If a redesign is coming, follow our website redesign SEO checklist before launch.

• How to choose an SEO expert in India — the questions to ask whoever runs this audit for you.
• SEO services — technical, on-page, off-page and local, from ₹8,000 a month.
• Website maintenance and management — keeping the fixes from quietly regressing.

Want this run on your site rather than read about? Send the URL through the contact page and you will get the prioritised list back, whether or not you hire anyone to fix it.