Your first technical audit: a starting checklist

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Follow the path from discovery to a usable page.

• Check that important URLs return the intended HTTP status.
  
• Review robots.txt rules and page-level robots directives.
  
• Compare canonical tags with the URLs you want indexed.
  
• Make sure XML sitemaps contain useful, accessible canonical pages.
  
• Inspect internal links and avoid unnecessary redirect chains.
  
• Check whether essential content is available to search crawlers.
  
• Use Search Console inspection reports to investigate individual examples.
  

Prioritize issues by the pages affected and the likely business impact. Add evidence and a verification step to each proposed fix.