Before you audit anything, decide where your evidence actually comes from. Third-party SEO tools guess at what’s happening on your site. Your own server logs and Search Console data know.
This matters more as sites get larger. Cross-reference your “intended” site map against what your logs show Googlebot actually crawling — the gap between the two is usually where your biggest wins are hiding. A few things this reveals that a generic crawl report won’t:
- Crawl traps — infinite loops from filtered search pages or calendar widgets that quietly consume your entire crawl budget.
- “Discovered but not crawled” vs. “crawled but not indexed” in Search Console’s Coverage report — the first usually means your server is too slow or the content isn’t worth the effort; the second is a quality or duplication signal.
- The “click depth” test — if a page takes more than 4 clicks from your homepage to reach, it functionally doesn’t exist to most crawlers.
The practical takeaway: don’t start a technical SEO project by buying a tool. Start by pulling your own logs and your full Search Console coverage data (every subdomain, every staging environment) and seeing what your site is actually doing, not what a crawler assumes it’s doing.
For the full foundational checklist and a phased approach to fixing what you find, see 10 Technical SEO Audit Things Large Orgs Can’t Ignore.
