Knowledge · SEO Services
Technical SEO Audit Checklist for Mid-Market B2B Sites
Most ‘technical SEO audits’ you’ll buy from a Tampa agency are a Screaming Frog export with a Yoast green-light screenshot stapled to the front. Here’s what a real audit covers, in the order it matters, with the tools we actually use across 200+ mid-market B2B engagements.
№ 01Crawl: what Google actually sees
Start with a full Screaming Frog crawl (free up to 500 URLs, $259/year above). Filter for: 4xx errors, 5xx errors, 301 chains longer than 1 hop, canonical conflicts, duplicate title tags, duplicate H1s, pages indexed but not in sitemap, sitemap entries that 404.
Cross-reference against Google Search Console Pages report. The delta — pages GSC sees that the crawl doesn’t, or vice versa — is where most index bloat lives. Mid-market B2B sites with 40-80 real pages often have 400-1,200 indexed URLs because of tag pages, author archives, paginated comments, and parameter URLs.
№ 02Indexation: kill the bloat
Index bloat dilutes ranking signal. A site with 1,200 indexed URLs but 60 real pages spreads its authority across 20× more pages than it should. Fixes: noindex on tag/category archives if you don’t use them, noindex on author pages on single-author sites, canonical tags pointing to clean URLs on parameter pages, sitemap pruning to only the URLs you actually want indexed.
The target ratio: indexed URL count within 20% of your sitemap entry count. Anything beyond that is bloat or sitemap incompleteness, and both kill rank.
№ 03Site speed: the part everyone gets wrong
PageSpeed Insights scores are vanity metrics. The metrics that matter for ranking: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5s, Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, measured in GSC’s Core Web Vitals report (which uses real Chrome user data, not synthetic Lighthouse runs).
The four levers that move CWV on WordPress: hosting (Kinsta or Cloudways beat shared hosting by 2-4×), image format (WebP or AVIF, not JPEG), lazy loading (native browser support, no plugin needed), and JavaScript reduction (the page-builder problem). Optimize those four and CWV passes for 90% of mid-market B2B sites.
№ 04Schema: structured data that earns SERP real estate
The schema types that earn enhanced SERP listings for mid-market B2B: Organization (homepage), LocalBusiness (if you have a physical location), Service (every service page), FAQPage (any page with 3+ Q&A pairs), BreadcrumbList (every page), Article (knowledge content), and Product (if you sell products).
Validate every schema in Google’s Rich Results Test, not just the Schema Markup Validator. Rich Results Test tells you if the schema is eligible for an enhanced listing; the regular validator just tells you if the syntax is valid.
№ 05The audit deliverable: prioritized, not exhaustive
A real audit closes with a prioritized list: top 10 fixes by impact-to-effort ratio, each with an effort estimate (in dev hours) and an expected impact (rank movement, traffic lift, or technical health score). Not a 200-page screenshot dump.
Our $500 fixed-price audit ships a 12-18 page PDF in 5 business days, with the Top 10 list on page 2. Anything Page 3+ is supporting evidence. If you can’t read the executive summary and know what to fix on Monday, the audit failed.
⚠What to avoid
- Selling a 200-page PDF audit with no prioritization. Volume signals effort, not value. The point is the Top 10 fix list, not the screenshot count.
- Running a Lighthouse score in incognito and shipping that as the ‘speed audit.’ Real CWV is in GSC, measured on real Chrome users across 28 days. Lighthouse is synthetic.
- Recommending a switch from Yoast to Rank Math (or vice versa) as a ‘fix.’ SEO plugin choice has near-zero ranking impact. The recommendation is filler.
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