A technical SEO audit consultant is hired to find out why a site underperforms for reasons that have nothing to do with what is written on it. The deliverable is a diagnosis: what is stopping pages being crawled, indexed, rendered or served fast enough, ranked in order of what would actually change the outcome. It is one of the easiest things in this market to buy badly, because a crawler licence and a template can produce a two hundred page document in an afternoon that looks thorough and changes nothing. This page sets out what a real audit covers, how to buy one so the findings get implemented, and how to tell the two apart before you pay.
What a real technical audit covers
Four layers, in the order a search engine encounters them. Crawling: whether robots rules, internal linking, server responses and sitemaps let a crawler reach the pages that matter, and whether crawling is being wasted on pages that do not. Google's own guidance on large sites names the remedies bluntly: consolidate duplicate content, block unnecessary URLs in robots.txt, return 404 or 410 for permanently removed pages, keep sitemaps current with lastmod, and support caching so unchanged pages can return a 304. Indexing: whether the pages that are crawled are actually stored, and why the ones that are not have been excluded. Rendering: whether the content a crawler sees matches what a user sees, which is where JavaScript-heavy sites usually break. And serving: speed, stability and mobile behaviour. A report that is only a crawler export with severity colours has covered the first layer and skipped three.
Speed and stability, measured the way Google measures it
Core Web Vitals are Google's named set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity and visual stability. There are three. Largest Contentful Paint measures loading performance, with a target of occurring within the first 2.5 seconds. Interaction to Next Paint measures responsiveness, with a goal of less than 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability, targeting a score of less than 0.1. Google advises site owners to achieve good Core Web Vitals for success in Search and says this aligns with what its core ranking systems seek to reward alongside other page experience factors, and points to the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for monitoring. Two things follow for a buyer. An audit that reports only lab scores from a testing tool, without the field data that these metrics are defined on, is measuring a simulation. And a consultant who presents Core Web Vitals as the reason a site does not rank is overselling one input among many.
The evidence base an audit should be built on
Search Console is where most of the real answers are. Google describes it as a free service that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot a site's presence in Google Search, covering confirmation that Google can crawl the site, indexing problems, search traffic data including impressions, clicks and queries, alerts about issues, and backlinks. It also notes that signing up is not required to appear in Search, but that it helps you understand how Google sees your site. An auditor working only from a third-party crawler is working from a model of your site; an auditor working from Search Console plus a crawler plus server logs is working from what actually happened. Ask which of the three a candidate will use. Grant read-only access for the audit rather than write access, which is what Google's own hiring guidance recommends during an evaluation.
Buying an audit that actually gets implemented
The commonest way to waste this money is to buy a document rather than an outcome. Specify the deliverable as a prioritised list of changes, each with the evidence behind it, an estimate of effort, an expected effect described as a range, and enough implementation detail that a developer who has never met the consultant can act on it. Ask for the findings in your own issue tracker's format if you have one. Insist on a working session with the engineering team rather than a slide presentation to marketing, because the people who will ship the fixes need to argue with the findings while the consultant is still in the room. Agree a follow-up check after implementation, since an audit with no verification step never finds out whether it was right. And apply the standard hiring tests from Google's guidance: previous work and success stories, expected results and timeframe, industry experience, and the warning signs, including that no one can guarantee a number one ranking.
Questions people ask about technical seo audit consultant
What should a technical SEO audit include?
Crawling, indexing, rendering and serving, evidenced from Search Console, a crawl and ideally server logs, delivered as a prioritised list of changes with effort and expected effect rather than as an undifferentiated list of issues.
How long does an audit take?
For most sites a few weeks between access being granted and findings being presented. Be sceptical of a two-day turnaround, which usually means a crawler export with a cover page, and of a three-month engagement that has not produced anything actionable in the first month.
Are Core Web Vitals a ranking factor?
Google says site owners should achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and that this aligns with what its core ranking systems reward, alongside other page experience factors. Treat them as an input worth fixing, not as the explanation for a ranking problem.
What are the Core Web Vitals thresholds?
Largest Contentful Paint within the first 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. The Core Web Vitals report in Search Console is where Google suggests monitoring them.
What access does an auditor need?
Read-only Search Console and analytics access, plus server logs where possible. Google's hiring guidance recommends granting read-only Search Console access for an audit rather than write access.