How to Run a Technical SEO Audit and Actually Fix What It Finds
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How we run one, step by step
Start with a full crawl
Point a crawler like Screaming Frog at your site. The free version handles 500 URLs. Have it map status codes, redirects, titles and canonicals. Now this is not a very exciting looking side of SEO tech but it surely is where most findings come from: 404s, redirect chains, duplicated titles and pages nothing links to. Those orphan pages catch a lot of people out, so we wrote a separate piece on finding and fixing orphan pages.
Check what Google has actually indexed
Your crawl shows what exists. Search Console's Page indexing report shows what Google decided to keep. "Crawled, currently not indexed" usually means Google looked and wasn't impressed, often because the page is thin. "Blocked by robots.txt" is more worrying; sometimes a whole folder was hidden during development and nobody switched it back. If crawling is new territory, our guide to how website crawling works is a good primer.
Look at how your pages connect
Key pages should sit within about three clicks of the homepage. Bury your best service page four menus deep and Google will treat it as an afterthought too.
Test speed on real devices
Use your Core Web Vitals report alongside when reviewing PageSpeed Insights. Meeting all three can be a challenge of keeping Google’s targets are an LCP below 2.5 seconds, an INP under 200 milliseconds, and a CLS below 0.1. Just 48% of mobile websites pass every metric as per the 2025 Web Almanac.
End with schema, hreflang and HTTPS
Test structured data with Google's Rich Results Test If you have English and Arabic versions, make sure the hreflang tags point to each other or they’ll be competing. And be sure that every URL has a single HTTPS version.
What usually turns up on UAE websites
Our technical SEO checklist for UAE websites goes through a longer list.
Deciding what to fix first
A mid-sized site can throw up hundreds of warnings. Don't work through them top to bottom. Any barriers preventing revenue pages from being indexed above all else, then sitewide template issues second, and lack of alt text on a blog post from 2019 can wait. To be frank, this kind of triage is really what separates a good search engine optimization consultant from the pack, because being able to tell you which five things are costing you leads is what turns a list into an SEO audit for Dubai businesses to act on.
Should you do it yourself?
For a 15-page brochure site, probably yes. Large catalogues, bilingual sites and anything recently migrated are a different story, and that's when specialist technical SEO services save time and costly mistakes.
If budget is the worry, plenty of agencies offer affordable SEO audit services Dubai businesses can use as a first step. Ours starts with a free SEO audit, which at least tells you whether there's a problem worth paying to fix.
Frequently asked questions
How long is a technical SEO audit?
A couple of days for a small site and up to one to three weeks for a big ecommerce site. Day or two for a small site; one to three weeks for a big e-store.
How frequently should I be auditing my website?
Twice annually, and whenever there is a redesign or migration. Look once a month at Search Console to catch most of the surprises in between.
What do I need?
Search Console, PageSpeed Insights : Screaming Frog, Rich Results Test. Only the crawler costs money, and only past 500 URLs.
What should I fix first?
Whatever is stopping your most valuable pages from being crawled or indexed. If you'd like help turning an SEO audit Dubai (pk) report into a realistic plan, get in touch with our team.
About The Author: Lovetto Nazareth
Lovetto Nazareth is the Founder & CEO of Prism Digital, a Dubai-based digital marketing and advertising agency he started nearly two decades ago from a laptop and a vision, as he puts it, to one of the region's established full-service agencies spanning SEO, PPC, social media, web design, and PR.
Over more than 19 years in advertising and digital marketing, Lovetto has guided thousands of campaigns across the UAE and GCC, working across sectors from real estate to hospitality to fintech. He writes and speaks on digital transformation and marketing strategy, and has contributed opinion pieces to Campaign Middle East, one of the region's leading marketing trade publications.
He takes a data-first approach to growth testing, measuring, and iterating rather than relying on guesswork and outside of work he's an adventure sports enthusiast and a singer-songwriter.
