Denver SEO Audit: What a Technical Review Covers

If you run a business in Denver and your site is not showing up for the searches your customers make, a Denver SEO audit is the cheapest way to find out why before spending money on content or links. This guide walks through what a technical review checks, the order we check it in, and how to tell a real finding from tool noise.

Why the Order of an Audit Matters

Search engines process a site in stages: they discover a URL, crawl it, render it, decide whether to index it, and only then rank it. A problem at an early stage hides every problem after it. There is no point tuning the meta description of a page that carries a stray noindex tag, and no point rewriting service copy on a page Google has folded into a duplicate.

So an audit runs in the same direction as Google does. Each stage either passes or produces a finding, and findings from earlier stages almost always outrank findings from later ones in the final report.

Stage One: Crawl Access

We start with what a crawler can and cannot reach. A desktop crawler such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Sitebulb follows every internal link from the home page and records what it finds. The checks at this stage:

• Status codes. Every page you want found should return 200. Clusters of 404s from old URLs, and any 5xx server errors, get flagged first.
• Redirects. Chains (A to B to C) and loops waste crawl attempts and leak signals. After a redesign or a move to HTTPS, chains are the norm, not the exception.
• robots.txt. A single Disallow: / left over from a staging site can block everything. Blocking CSS or JavaScript folders can also stop Google from rendering pages properly.
• Click depth and orphans. Important pages should sit within three or four clicks of the home page. Pages with no internal links at all rely entirely on the sitemap.

Stage Two: What Google Actually Indexed

A crawl tells you what exists. Google Search Console tells you what Google kept. The Page indexing report lists every URL Google knows about and the reason any of them were left out, with labels such as "Crawled, currently not indexed", "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" and "Excluded by noindex tag". Comparing that list against the crawl and the XML sitemap is where the biggest surprises in an audit usually come from.

The indexing and Search Console guide covers each report in more detail, including how to verify a domain property through DNS.

Stage Three: Rendering and Speed

Google renders pages with a recent version of Chrome, so most JavaScript sites can be indexed. The trouble starts when key content only appears after an interaction, loads from an API that blocks Googlebot, or depends on a script that errors. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows the rendered HTML Google saw; comparing it with what a visitor sees takes a few minutes and settles the question.

Speed is measured with field data first. PageSpeed Insights shows Chrome User Experience Report data for real visits over the previous 28 days when a page or origin has enough traffic, and a Lighthouse lab test underneath. Lab scores are useful for debugging but they are not what Google uses. Our Core Web Vitals guide explains the three metrics and their thresholds.

Stage Four: Markup, On-Page and Links

With access, indexing and speed settled, the audit moves to the signals that describe each page:

The Messy Middle: Site Migrations

The audits that matter most are often requested after something went wrong: a new website launched, the domain changed, or a platform moved from WordPress to a hosted builder, and traffic fell. The cause is nearly always the same set of things. Old URLs were not redirected one-to-one to their new equivalents, the staging site's robots.txt or noindex shipped to production, or internal links still point at the old URL structure through redirects.

Recovery starts with a list of the old URLs, which can come from Search Console's Performance report, an old sitemap, or the Wayback Machine. Each one is mapped to the closest new page and redirected with a 301. Redirecting everything to the home page is tempting and almost always wrong: Google tends to treat those as soft 404s.

What a Good Audit Report Looks Like

Whoever writes your audit, ask for these things in the report, not just a crawler export:

1. A ranked list of findings with an estimated impact and effort for each.
2. The specific URLs affected, or a pattern that identifies them.
3. The reason the finding matters in one or two sentences, without jargon.
4. A fix a developer can act on, with a way to verify it worked.

That is the format we use for the free audit. If you would like one, send the site address and what concerns you.

Denver SEO Audit FAQ