If your website’s traffic has stalled — or you’re just not sure where you stand in search — a technical SEO audit is usually the fastest way to find out what’s actually holding you back. It’s not a guess or a generic checklist; it’s a structured look at the specific things search engines check before they’ll rank a page.
Here’s what we actually review when we audit a site for a business in Long Branch, Lincroft, Toms River, or anywhere else in New Jersey.
Site speed and Core Web Vitals
Google measures how fast your pages load, how quickly they become interactive, and whether content shifts around while loading. Slow or unstable pages don’t just frustrate visitors — they get ranked lower.
Crawlability and indexing
If Google can’t crawl a page, it can’t rank it. We check your robots.txt file, XML sitemap, and internal linking to make sure your important pages are actually reachable — and that pages you don’t want indexed (like admin or thin archive pages) aren’t quietly competing with your real content.
Broken links, redirects, and site structure
Old URLs that 404, redirect chains, and a confusing site structure all waste crawl budget and hurt user experience. Part of every audit is mapping out what’s broken and fixing it with clean, direct redirects.
Duplicate content and canonicalization
When the same content is reachable from multiple URLs — a common issue on WordPress sites — search engines can get confused about which version to rank. We check for duplicate or near-duplicate pages and make sure canonical tags are pointing where they should.
Schema markup
Structured data (schema) is how you tell search engines and AI tools exactly what’s on a page — your business name, address, services, and more — instead of leaving them to guess from the text. It’s become especially important as AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews rely on it to answer questions directly.
Mobile responsiveness and performance
Most searches happen on a phone. If a site isn’t genuinely easy to use on mobile — not just “doesn’t break,” but actually fast and readable — it’s going to underperform regardless of everything else.
Plugin and theme conflicts
WordPress-specific, but common: outdated or conflicting plugins can silently break functionality, slow a site down, or introduce security issues that affect SEO over time.
What you get at the end
A real audit isn’t a wall of jargon — it’s a prioritized list of what’s actually worth fixing first, in plain language. If you’re not sure where your site stands, that’s exactly where to start.
Curious what a technical SEO audit would find on your site? See our SEO services or get in touch to talk through it.