What the SEO audit examines
Technical SEO problems are rarely mysterious once you look at the markup. They are usually a template inheriting the wrong title pattern, a canonical pointing at staging, or a section of the site that no internal link reaches. The SEO portion of a W3Audit engagement covers the following, page by page rather than in aggregate.
- Unique title on every page — Every page’s title collected and checked for absence, truncation, duplication across templates, and mismatch with the page’s actual content.
- Unique meta description on every page — Present, distinct, written for the click — not a template string repeated across a whole section.
- One H1, then a descending heading order — Whether each page has exactly one clear H1 and whether H2/H3 levels descend in order rather than being chosen for size.
- Structured data valid and honest — Presence, syntax validity and type appropriateness of JSON-LD markup, and whether marked-up content matches what is on the page.
- Open Graph and Twitter card markup — Title, description, image and URL present, so shared links render rather than degrade.
- No thin or duplicate content — Thin pages, near-duplicate templates, and paginated or parameterised variants competing with each other.
- Internal links reach everything and describe it — Where link equity concentrates, which pages are orphaned, and whether anchor text describes the destination.
Crawl directives, canonical tags, sitemap accuracy and URL structure are audited too, but reported under technical and crawlability — that is where the fixes live.
How findings are produced
Each page’s raw HTML is fetched and evaluated as delivered; these checks read the HTML as delivered, so content injected client-side after load is not assessed (three checks elsewhere in the audit do run against the live page — see the methodology). Crawl directives are read from all three places they can be set — robots.txt, meta tags and response headers — because conflicting signals between them are one of the most common causes of pages quietly falling out of the index.
Findings are then grouped so you get “38 product pages share one meta description” rather than thirty-eight separate rows. Severity follows the rules on the methodology page: anything that blocks indexing outright is critical, regardless of how few pages it touches.
Findings this audit commonly surfaces
These are the SEO issues we write up most often. Each has its own explanation, fix and verification steps:
- Missing or duplicate title tags
- Missing meta descriptions
- Missing or incorrect canonical tags
- Heading structure problems
- Broken links and redirect chains
What this audit does not claim
Off-site work is not part of the audit: we do not analyse your backlink profile, run link-building campaigns or do disavow work. Rankings and traffic forecasts are not part of the deliverable — the audit tells you what is technically wrong and what it is likely costing you, not what position a keyword will reach by a given date.
Where SEO meets the rest of the audit
Search performance depends heavily on two other categories. Slow pages and heavy images are handled in the performance audit; markup validity, crawl directives and error handling are covered in more depth in the HTML and technical audit. Because all thirty-two checks run on the same crawl, the report can tell you when an SEO symptom has a performance or markup cause.