Screaming Frog and Ahrefs will dump 4,000 issues on you. About 40 actually matter. A real technical SEO audit is the work of separating the two — here's the shortlist.
Screaming Frog and Ahrefs will dump 4,000 issues on you. About 40 actually matter. A real technical SEO audit is the work of separating the two — here's the shortlist.
Run Screaming Frog on a 5,000-URL ecommerce site and you'll get back roughly 4,000 issues. Run Ahrefs site audit on the same site and you'll get a different 3,500. Run them both, deduplicate, sort by severity, and you'll still have 600 things flagged red — most of which don't matter and a few of which will quietly tank your rankings if you ignore them.
A technical SEO audit is the work of separating the two. It's not running the tools — anyone can do that. It's knowing which 40 of those 4,000 issues are the ones changing search visibility, why they exist, and the order to fix them in. This piece is the shortlist.
A technical SEO audit reviews everything that affects whether Google can crawl, index, render, and rank your pages — separate from content quality or link profile. It covers indexation, internal linking, render-blocking, page speed, structured data, mobile usability, and hreflang/canonical hygiene. A good one ends with a prioritised shortlist of fixes ranked by impact-on-ranking divided by effort.
The four phases:
Skipping any of the four is what makes most audits useless. Most agencies skip phase 2 entirely because JavaScript-rendered SEO is hard.
Out of every audit I've run on an ecommerce site, the priority shortlist almost always collapses into one of these four buckets. Here's the priority weighting:
Relative impact across ~50 ecommerce audits, 2023–2025. Bars show typical lift potential when each bucket is fully fixed. Your priority order depends on which is currently broken.
This is where the tools are most helpful — and most overwhelming. Six checks that matter, the rest is noise:
If your site is built on React, Vue, or any heavy JavaScript framework, Google sees a two-stage page: the initial HTML, then the post-JS rendered content. Most automated crawlers test the first; rankings depend on the second.
Three checks:
The fix is usually server-side rendering (SSR) or static generation (SSG) for the critical content. Google's official JavaScript SEO guidance is the source of truth here — most tutorials online are 3+ years out of date.
The three metrics that ship in Google's ranking signal:
| Metric | Good | Needs work | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP — Largest Contentful Paint | < 2.5s | 2.5–4.0s | > 4.0s |
| INP — Interaction to Next Paint | < 200ms | 200–500ms | > 500ms |
| CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift | < 0.1 | 0.1–0.25 | > 0.25 |
You need the 75th-percentile-or-better passing across all three on mobile to count as "Good" in Search Console's Page Experience report. Most ecommerce sites pass LCP and CLS easily but fail INP because of heavy third-party JS (chat widgets, analytics, A/B testing tools).
The top 5 culprits we find in INP audits:
<link rel="preload" as="image"> in the head.font-display: swap.Most ecommerce sites have a power-law internal link distribution — the homepage and top-level collections get 80% of internal links, and 60% of product pages have fewer than 3 incoming internal links. That's why deep product pages don't rank.
Audit: pull the internal link count per URL. Anything below 3 incoming internal links is an orphan candidate. Add it to a "popular products" module on the homepage, a related-products module on adjacent products, or a category landing page that includes it.
Five schema types that matter for ecommerce:
Two common failures:
| Deliverable | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Prioritised fix list (40 items max) | Tools dump thousands. You can only fix dozens. |
| Impact estimate per fix | Engineering time is finite; rank by impact ÷ effort. |
| Implementation spec per fix | Developer-readable — what file/template/setting to change. |
| Baseline metrics + measurement plan | So you can prove the fixes worked in 90 days. |
| Index/render comparison report | Phase 2 — what Google sees vs view-source. |
| Crawl waste analysis | How much of your crawl budget is going to non-indexable URLs. |
If your audit deliverable is a PDF with 200 generic issues sorted by severity, that's the tool output. The audit was the work of distilling it. Ask for the distilled version.
For a typical ecommerce site (1k–10k URLs), a real audit takes 25–40 hours of senior SEO time. £4,000–£8,000 in the UK at typical day-rates, A$7,000–A$14,000 in Australia. Project-based audits without ongoing engagement run higher per-hour than retainer audits because there's no continuity premium.
If you're being quoted £800 for a "technical SEO audit," that's a tool report with light commentary. Useful for confirming a baseline; not the priority shortlist you actually need.
Full audit once a year. Lightweight monthly check on Search Console's Page Experience + Index Coverage reports — catches new issues before they compound. After any major site change (replatform, redesign, framework migration), full audit again.
Yes for the tool-running part. The interpretation part — which 40 of 4,000 issues matter — takes experience that's hard to bootstrap. If you have 6+ months of hands-on SEO and you've worked on at least one site that ranks, your audit will be useful. Otherwise the audit becomes a checklist exercise.
Technical covers crawl/index/render/structure — everything Google's bot interacts with. Full SEO audit also includes content quality, keyword strategy, link profile, and competitor analysis. Most "SEO audits" in the market are full audits with a technical chapter; if you specifically need the technical layer fixed, ask for it specifically.
Indexation fixes (Phase 1) — 2–4 weeks. Render fixes (Phase 2) — 4–8 weeks for the affected pages to re-index and re-rank. Core Web Vitals (Phase 3) — 6–12 weeks for the field data to refresh in Search Console + ranking signal to update. Structure changes (Phase 4) — depends on crawl rate, usually 1–3 months.
No. They provide the raw material. The audit is the prioritisation, the rendering check, and the developer-spec for fixes. Tools alone produce a 300-issue list that engineering ignores — which is worse than no audit.
Qwrki runs SEO as part of the operating layer — same team that audits also implements the fixes, monitors the lift, and updates the ranking model in your live dashboard. Faster cycle than the typical agency model where audit and implementation are separated by two months and a contract.
If your site has been live more than 18 months and SEO traffic has plateaued or dropped, the audit is usually where to start. Book a call — we'll run the Phase 1 scan honestly in the first hour and tell you whether a full audit is justified.
Most CRO advice starts with A/B tests. Wrong order. Learn the audit-first process: where conversion actually leaks, what to fix outright, and when testing earns its place.
How to do keyword research for an online store: map intent to page types, find buyer keywords, and stop chasing volume that never converts.
A content strategy for online stores that earns revenue, not just traffic: comparison pieces, buying guides and the publishing order that compounds.
Run Screaming Frog on a 5,000-URL ecommerce site and you'll get back roughly 4,000 issues. Run Ahrefs site audit on the same site and you'll get a different 3,500. Run them both, deduplicate, sort by severity, and you'll still have 600 things flagged red — most of which don't matter and a few of which will quietly tank your rankings if you ignore them.
A technical SEO audit is the work of separating the two. It's not running the tools — anyone can do that. It's knowing which 40 of those 4,000 issues are the ones changing search visibility, why they exist, and the order to fix them in. This piece is the shortlist.
A technical SEO audit reviews everything that affects whether Google can crawl, index, render, and rank your pages — separate from content quality or link profile. It covers indexation, internal linking, render-blocking, page speed, structured data, mobile usability, and hreflang/canonical hygiene. A good one ends with a prioritised shortlist of fixes ranked by impact-on-ranking divided by effort.
The four phases:
Skipping any of the four is what makes most audits useless. Most agencies skip phase 2 entirely because JavaScript-rendered SEO is hard.
Out of every audit I've run on an ecommerce site, the priority shortlist almost always collapses into one of these four buckets. Here's the priority weighting:
Relative impact across ~50 ecommerce audits, 2023–2025. Bars show typical lift potential when each bucket is fully fixed. Your priority order depends on which is currently broken.
This is where the tools are most helpful — and most overwhelming. Six checks that matter, the rest is noise:
If your site is built on React, Vue, or any heavy JavaScript framework, Google sees a two-stage page: the initial HTML, then the post-JS rendered content. Most automated crawlers test the first; rankings depend on the second.
Three checks:
The fix is usually server-side rendering (SSR) or static generation (SSG) for the critical content. Google's official JavaScript SEO guidance is the source of truth here — most tutorials online are 3+ years out of date.
The three metrics that ship in Google's ranking signal:
| Metric | Good | Needs work | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| LCP — Largest Contentful Paint | < 2.5s | 2.5–4.0s | > 4.0s |
| INP — Interaction to Next Paint | < 200ms | 200–500ms | > 500ms |
| CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift | < 0.1 | 0.1–0.25 | > 0.25 |
You need the 75th-percentile-or-better passing across all three on mobile to count as "Good" in Search Console's Page Experience report. Most ecommerce sites pass LCP and CLS easily but fail INP because of heavy third-party JS (chat widgets, analytics, A/B testing tools).
The top 5 culprits we find in INP audits:
<link rel="preload" as="image"> in the head.font-display: swap.Most ecommerce sites have a power-law internal link distribution — the homepage and top-level collections get 80% of internal links, and 60% of product pages have fewer than 3 incoming internal links. That's why deep product pages don't rank.
Audit: pull the internal link count per URL. Anything below 3 incoming internal links is an orphan candidate. Add it to a "popular products" module on the homepage, a related-products module on adjacent products, or a category landing page that includes it.
Five schema types that matter for ecommerce:
Two common failures:
| Deliverable | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Prioritised fix list (40 items max) | Tools dump thousands. You can only fix dozens. |
| Impact estimate per fix | Engineering time is finite; rank by impact ÷ effort. |
| Implementation spec per fix | Developer-readable — what file/template/setting to change. |
| Baseline metrics + measurement plan | So you can prove the fixes worked in 90 days. |
| Index/render comparison report | Phase 2 — what Google sees vs view-source. |
| Crawl waste analysis | How much of your crawl budget is going to non-indexable URLs. |
If your audit deliverable is a PDF with 200 generic issues sorted by severity, that's the tool output. The audit was the work of distilling it. Ask for the distilled version.
For a typical ecommerce site (1k–10k URLs), a real audit takes 25–40 hours of senior SEO time. £4,000–£8,000 in the UK at typical day-rates, A$7,000–A$14,000 in Australia. Project-based audits without ongoing engagement run higher per-hour than retainer audits because there's no continuity premium.
If you're being quoted £800 for a "technical SEO audit," that's a tool report with light commentary. Useful for confirming a baseline; not the priority shortlist you actually need.
Full audit once a year. Lightweight monthly check on Search Console's Page Experience + Index Coverage reports — catches new issues before they compound. After any major site change (replatform, redesign, framework migration), full audit again.
Yes for the tool-running part. The interpretation part — which 40 of 4,000 issues matter — takes experience that's hard to bootstrap. If you have 6+ months of hands-on SEO and you've worked on at least one site that ranks, your audit will be useful. Otherwise the audit becomes a checklist exercise.
Technical covers crawl/index/render/structure — everything Google's bot interacts with. Full SEO audit also includes content quality, keyword strategy, link profile, and competitor analysis. Most "SEO audits" in the market are full audits with a technical chapter; if you specifically need the technical layer fixed, ask for it specifically.
Indexation fixes (Phase 1) — 2–4 weeks. Render fixes (Phase 2) — 4–8 weeks for the affected pages to re-index and re-rank. Core Web Vitals (Phase 3) — 6–12 weeks for the field data to refresh in Search Console + ranking signal to update. Structure changes (Phase 4) — depends on crawl rate, usually 1–3 months.
No. They provide the raw material. The audit is the prioritisation, the rendering check, and the developer-spec for fixes. Tools alone produce a 300-issue list that engineering ignores — which is worse than no audit.
Qwrki runs SEO as part of the operating layer — same team that audits also implements the fixes, monitors the lift, and updates the ranking model in your live dashboard. Faster cycle than the typical agency model where audit and implementation are separated by two months and a contract.
If your site has been live more than 18 months and SEO traffic has plateaued or dropped, the audit is usually where to start. Book a call — we'll run the Phase 1 scan honestly in the first hour and tell you whether a full audit is justified.
Most CRO advice starts with A/B tests. Wrong order. Learn the audit-first process: where conversion actually leaks, what to fix outright, and when testing earns its place.
How to do keyword research for an online store: map intent to page types, find buyer keywords, and stop chasing volume that never converts.
A content strategy for online stores that earns revenue, not just traffic: comparison pieces, buying guides and the publishing order that compounds.