Technical SEO audit: the 15-minute version that catches 80% of problems

Full technical SEO audits are thorough, expensive, and often overkill for a site that hasn't had one in over a year: the majority of the value is concentrated in a handful of checks that take minutes, not days, to run.

The fifteen-minute version: confirm the site's robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking something important, check that the XML sitemap actually matches what's live, since a stale sitemap referencing deleted pages is more common than it should be, verify canonical tags aren't pointing to the wrong URL variant, and spot-check that key pages are actually indexed via a site: search.

On sites that haven't been checked recently, this fifteen-minute pass reliably finds at least one real problem: most often a canonical tag left pointing at a staging URL after a migration, or a sitemap that still lists pages a redesign removed six months ago.

This isn't a substitute for a deep audit when something's genuinely wrong. It's a maintenance habit: run quarterly, it catches the kind of silent regression that otherwise goes unnoticed for months, quietly costing rankings the whole time.