Skip to main content
A technical audit checks that your site can be crawled, indexed, rendered, and understood. It is the foundation: content and links cannot compensate for a page that cannot be reached.

​
What is checked

Crawling — robots.txt rules, redirect chains, server response codes, orphan pages, crawl traps from faceted navigation. Indexation — noindex directives, canonical correctness and conflicts, duplicate content, thin pages, soft 404s, parameter handling. Rendering — whether body content, prices, and specifications are present in served HTML rather than requiring JavaScript. Structure — hierarchy depth, internal link distribution, breadcrumbs, pagination, sitemap accuracy. Structured data — presence, completeness, validity, and agreement with the visible page. Performance — Core Web Vitals against field data. International — hreflang reciprocity and correctness, where applicable.

​
Prioritisation: what actually matters

Audit tools produce hundreds of findings. Most do not matter. Ranked by real impact: Fix first — these block everything
  • Pages that should be indexed but carry noindex or are blocked
  • Body content not rendered in HTML
  • Broken canonical logic causing wrong pages to be indexed
  • Redirect chains and loops on high-value URLs
  • Products unreachable by any crawl path
Fix next — these cost real traffic
  • Duplicate and thin content at scale
  • Crawl traps consuming budget on large catalogues
  • Missing or invalid Product markup
  • Soft 404s across removed products
  • Core Web Vitals failures on key templates
Fix when convenient
  • Missing alt text
  • Heading level inconsistencies
  • Meta description length
  • Minor structured data recommendations
Usually ignore
  • Tool-generated warnings with no defined impact
  • “SEO scores” out of 100
A store obsessing over alt text while half its catalogue is unindexable is optimising the wrong end.

​
Read the data, not just the crawl

The most useful audit inputs are not from a crawler:
  • Search Console → Pages shows what Google actually did with each URL — the ground truth on indexation
  • Search Console → Core Web Vitals gives field data, not lab simulation
  • Crawl stats show where budget is actually spent
A crawler tells you what could happen. Search Console tells you what did.

​
What Ryze does

Ryze runs this audit against your connected store and Search Console data, prioritises by expected impact rather than by count, and ships fixes with approval — within hours of sign-off. See what Ryze checks.

​
Cadence

Full audit at onboarding, then continuous monitoring rather than periodic re-audits. Issues appear when themes change, apps are installed, and products are removed — a quarterly audit misses weeks of damage.