Technical & Link SEO: site health and authority

01

How to run a technical audit

In simple words

A shop can have the best things in the world. If the door is locked, the lights are off and the signs point the wrong way, nobody comes in. A technical audit walks around your site and checks the doors, the lights and the signs.

Before this course: SEO Content & Keywords (course 3.8.2), which builds on SEO Basics (course 3.8). You already know crawling, indexing and serving, search intent, titles, snippets, internal links, canonicals and structured data. Now you check the engine under the hood: can Google reach, read and store your pages?

Key facts

Google Search works in stages: crawl (find and download), render (run the page, including JavaScript), index (store), then serve results (course 3.8). A technical problem can break any stage.
Pages that return a 200 status are queued for rendering, where a headless Chromium browser runs the JavaScript. Even a successful (2xx) response does not guarantee indexing.
Your free tools:

Tool	What it tells you
Search Console, Page indexing report	Which URLs are indexed, and why others are not
Search Console, URL Inspection	How Google sees one URL, including the rendered page
Search Console, Core Web Vitals and Links reports	Real-user speed, and who links to you
Rich Results Test	Whether a page's structured data and rendered HTML can be read
PageSpeed Insights	Lab and field speed data for one page

A good audit order: 1) Can Google reach it (crawl). 2) Is it indexed (index). 3) Is it fast and usable on phones (experience). 4) Do other sites trust it (links). Fix the earlier steps first.
Priority. Fix what affects your important pages first (home page, service pages, product pages). A tiny issue on an old unimportant page can wait.
Google says changes can show within hours or take months. Change one thing at a time and record the date.

Step by step

Verify your site in Search Console (free) and wait for data (it can take a few days).
Make a list of your 10 most important pages (the pages that bring customers).
Open the Page indexing report and write down how many pages are indexed and not indexed.
For each important page, paste the URL into URL Inspection and note: indexed yes or no, and any problem it shows.
Open the Core Web Vitals report and note any URLs marked "poor" or "needs improvement".
Start an audit sheet with columns: URL, problem, why it matters, fix, who, date, result.
Check: you have a list of important pages and a first audit sheet with at least five findings.

Watch on YouTube

Index coverage status in Search Console (Google Search Console Training)Google Search Central · YouTube · youtube.com

Videos by other creators on YouTube, for reference. They are not made by or affiliated with The Future Market.

LESSON 01How to run a technical audit

LESSON 01 / ANIMATED LESSON / AI VOICE00:00 / 01:00

Voice

Read the video script

[Host] "A technical audit asks one question: can Google reach, read and store my important pages?"
[Screen: Search Console Page indexing report] "Start with Page indexing and URL Inspection. They are free."
[Text on screen: Reach. Index. Experience. Trust.] "Check in order: reach, index, experience, trust."
[Host] "Fix important pages first. And change one thing at a time, so you know what worked."

Try it now

Set up Search Console for your site or a practice site. Make your list of 10 important pages and inspect each one with URL Inspection. Fill in at least five rows of your audit sheet.

ClaudeStuck? Copy a ready-made prompt for Claude

Copy this, open Claude, paste it, and Claude will walk you through the lesson step by step.

For a grown-up: Claude is for adults (18+). Copy this, paste it into Claude, and use the answer to explain the lesson to your child.

I'm learning "Technical & Link SEO: site health and authority" on The Future Market. Lesson 1: "How to run a technical audit".

What the lesson teaches:
- Google Search works in stages: crawl (find and download), render (run the page, including JavaScript), index (store), then serve results (course 3.8). A technical problem can break any stage.
- Pages that return a 200 status are queued for rendering, where a headless Chromium browser runs the JavaScript. Even a successful (2xx) response does not guarantee indexing.
- Your free tools:
- Search Console, Page indexing report - Which URLs are indexed, and why others are not
- Search Console, URL Inspection - How Google sees one URL, including the rendered page
- Search Console, Core Web Vitals and Links reports - Real-user speed, and who links to you
- Rich Results Test - Whether a page's structured data and rendered HTML can be read

The exercise I'm working on:
Set up Search Console for your site or a practice site. Make your list of 10 important pages and inspect each one with URL Inspection. Fill in at least five rows of your audit sheet.

I'm stuck. Please:
1. Explain the main idea in plain, simple words with one everyday example.
2. Walk me through the exercise one small step at a time. Ask me what I've done so far before giving the next step.
3. Don't just give me the final answer. Help me do it myself, and check my work when I share it.

I'm a parent helping my child (about 8 years old) with a lesson called "How to run a technical audit" from the course "Technical & Link SEO: site health and authority".

Here's what the lesson says:
A shop can have the best things in the world. If the door is locked, the lights are off and the signs point the wrong way, nobody comes in. A technical audit walks around your site and checks the doors, the lights and the signs.

The activity:
Set up Search Console for your site or a practice site. Make your list of 10 important pages and inspect each one with URL Inspection. Fill in at least five rows of your audit sheet.

Please explain this so an 8-year-old understands: short sentences, a fun everyday example, and no hard words.
Then give me 3 simple questions I can ask my child to check they understood, and a way to do the activity together, one tiny step at a time.

Open Claude

Sources

Google Search Central, JavaScript SEO basics (crawl, render, index): developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/javascr
Google Search Central, HTTP status codes, network and DNS errors: developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/http-network-error
web.dev, Web Vitals (tools): web.dev/articles/vitals

My notes

I learned this

02