How to Run a Technical SEO Crawl and Prioritise the Fixes

By Jim Huang, SEO Digital Marketing Consultant and AI Enthusiast · Last updated · Effort: Medium

What is a technical SEO crawl?

A technical SEO crawl visits a site the way a search engine does and lists the problems that stop pages from being found, understood or indexed: missing titles, broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content and canonical conflicts.

A site can have hundreds of technical problems, such as missing titles, broken links, redirect chains, duplicate content and canonical conflicts, and a raw crawl export does not say which to fix first.

Why it matters

Clean technical architecture is non-negotiable: without it, content and entity work leaks instead of compounding. Fix indexing issues first by cross-referencing sitemap URLs against Search Console indexing reports. Use one canonical HTTPS host with 301 redirects, use permanent redirects for permanent moves, and point every redirect straight at the final URL.

Value and limits

  • Practical value: Finds common technical issues across a site and ranks them by impact, so fixes can follow the right order: indexing and canonical problems first.
  • Limitation: A crawl sees what a crawler sees. It does not replace Search Console index data, and large sites need a page limit per run. The roughly 40% crawl-budget reduction often quoted is a practitioner heuristic, not a published benchmark.
  • Effort and payoff: Medium effort (fixes need developers). High payoff on sites that have never been audited.
  • Evidence: Confirmed · 2+ sources

How to test it with SERP01

Issue: A raw crawl export lists hundreds of problems without saying which to fix first. We rank them by impact and fix indexing and canonical problems first.

  1. Open the Site Monitor tool, enter your start URL and choose a page limit. Adjust the audit thresholds only if you need to.
  2. Run the audit. SERP01 crawls the site and runs performance tests in the background.
  3. Open the report: issues are grouped and ranked by impact, with the affected pages listed.
  4. Review the executive summary first, then the highest-impact issue groups.
  5. After fixes, re-run the audit and use the comparison view to confirm what was resolved.

Actionable items

  • Indexing first - fix indexing and canonical problems, then broken pages and redirects, then on-page items.
  • Straighten redirects - point every redirect straight to the final URL and use one canonical host.
  • Complete the basics - give every important page a unique title, description and one H1.
  • Re-run - run the audit again after each batch of fixes.

How SERP01 addresses this

Issues are written in plain language and ranked by impact, and a re-run comparison shows what you fixed and what regressed. Performance scores sit in the same report, so one run covers crawl issues and page speed.

Next step

Want to run this on your own site? Request a code and run the Site Monitor yourself.

Related resources: How to Write and Check Titles, Descriptions and Headings at Scale, How to Prioritise Core Web Vitals Fixes for Your Key Pages, How to Audit Schema Markup and Find Missing Types

About the author. Jim Huang is an established SEO Digital Marketing Consultant, SEO Director and AI enthusiast based in Arlington, Virginia. He specializes in search engine optimization strategy, digital growth, and building custom toolsets that leverage artificial intelligence.