What is a technical SEO audit and can I do one myself?
A technical audit checks whether search engines can find, crawl, render, and index your site properly: broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content, slow pages, blocked resources, and structured-data errors. For sites under 500 URLs you can absolutely do it yourself: free Screaming Frog plus GSC’s reports cover the essentials in an afternoon.
Technical SEO is plumbing: invisible when it works, ruinous when it leaks. The audit systematically answers four questions. Can crawlers reach everything? (robots.txt mistakes, broken internal links, orphan pages, redirect chains). Does Google index what matters and skip what does not? (GSC’s Page indexing report, duplicate content, canonical tags, accidental noindex). Do pages render and perform? (Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, JavaScript-dependent content). And is the markup right? (structured data errors, hreflang on international sites, sitemap hygiene).
The DIY version for a small site costs an afternoon and nothing else. Run Screaming Frog’s free tier (500 URLs) and fix what is red: broken links, redirect chains, missing or duplicate titles. Open GSC: the Page indexing report tells you what Google skipped and why, Core Web Vitals flags slow templates, and the URL Inspection tool answers page-level mysteries. Test a key page with rich-results testing. Most small-site audits surface the same five issues (broken links, a redirect mess from a past migration, thin duplicate pages, one slow template, missing schema), and all five are fixable without a consultant.
When audits earn their professional invoice: large sites (crawl budget and faceted navigation problems), JavaScript-heavy frameworks, migrations (the highest-stakes technical SEO moment), and unexplained traffic drops. There, paid crawlers justify themselves: Screaming Frog’s license for scale and configurability, Sitebulb when findings must persuade non-technical stakeholders with prioritized, explained reports. Cadence for everyone: a light quarterly self-audit, a deep one before and after any redesign or migration.