Technical SEO

Summary#

Technical SEO runs the eleven free technical checks against one URL at the same time and consolidates them into a single report: the Google Lighthouse scores, the four Lighthouse category scores, and every issue found, grouped and ranked by severity. It costs nothing to run.

Purpose#

Technical problems are cheap to find and expensive to leave. The eleven individual technical tools each answer one narrow question, and running them one at a time means eleven inputs, eleven waits and eleven separate reports to reconcile. This workflow exists so that the first thing you do with any site is one click, one wait, and one list of what is broken — before you spend a single credit on keywords, competitors or content.

Overview#

You give it a domain or a URL. It fires eleven checks in parallel:

Every one of them is a direct fetch or a Lighthouse call. Nothing here is an AI estimate, which is why the screen carries a NO AI ESTIMATES badge. The steps are launched about 0.7 seconds apart to stay inside provider rate limits, each retries automatically on a rate-limit or gateway error, and any step that exceeds 120 seconds is dropped so the rest of the report still renders.

Benefits#

• Free. Eleven checks, no credits, on every plan including Free.
• One input instead of eleven.
• One consolidated score instead of eleven disconnected reports.
• Every finding is measured, not inferred.
• A partial result is still a result: a failed step does not lose the other nine.

Use Cases#

• New site onboarding. You have just taken over a site and need its technical baseline before quoting any work.
• Pre-launch check. A redesign is about to go live and you need to know whether the redirects, canonical tags and sitemap survived it.
• Monthly hygiene. Re-run on the same URL to confirm nothing regressed since the last deploy.
• Free-plan evaluation. You want to try Metric Vault properly before paying; this workflow is the largest thing available at zero cost.
• Client-facing evidence. Export the audit as a PDF and use the issue list as the scope of work.

Requirements#

• A signed-in account. Any plan, including Free.
• A publicly reachable URL. Private, internal and loopback addresses are refused.
• No integration and no connected property. The checks read the live page.

Permissions#

The one paid extra is the Get recommendations button inside the finished audit, which generates a written fix guide and costs 1 credit.

Cost#

0 credits. The run card states it plainly: Free workflow — runs all 11 technical-SEO tools, no quota used, and the Quota Cost card reads FREE / 0 credits per run.

All eleven underlying tools are zero-cost, so the total is zero, however many times you run it. It does count towards the hourly fair-use limit of 100 light calls per hour, and one run makes eleven of those calls.

The only charge on this screen is Get recommendations in the Action Required panel: that generates a technical fix guide and costs 1 credit. See How credits work.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → Get Started → Technical SEO

The sidebar entry carries a green WORKFLOW badge. The screen title is Technical SEO Audit.

Inputs#

Press Enter in the field to run — the card says Tip: hit Enter after typing the URL. The See example button fills https://nike.com if the field is blank and renders a stored sample with no fetch and no credits.

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Open Dashboard → Get Started → Technical SEO.
2. Type a domain or URL into domain or URL (e.g. nike.com).
3. Press Run Full Tech Audit · FREE, or press Enter.
4. Watch the Analysis Progress card. Each of the eleven rows moves from Queued… to Running… to Complete, or shows a short failure message.
5. When the run finishes, read the health hero at the top of the report.
6. Work down the Action Required panel.
7. Open the collapsed per-tool blocks below for the raw detail behind any issue.
8. Use Export PDF Report, Share Audit, Copy Summary or Re-run Audit from the action bar under the hero.

Reading the Results#

The health hero. The first card is the summary of the whole audit.

• The eyebrow reads TECHNICAL SEO · N/11 TOOLS PASSED. That is the count of checks that returned data without an error, not the count that found no problems.
• The score is Google's, not ours. The large number is the average of the Lighthouse categories that came back, labelled Google Lighthouse, and the chip follows Google's own bands: green at 90 and above, amber from 50, red below. There is no Metric Vault verdict word over it.
• The basis line says what went into it: Average of four Lighthouse categories · this page only, or Average of N of 4 when a category is missing. When PageSpeed does not answer at all, the score is shown as — and the line reads N of 11 checks completed · Lighthouse unavailable. It used to fall back to the share of checks that ran, rendered as a 0-100 score, which reported a healthy site on the strength of our own tools working.
• Google Lighthouse average is the same number as a filled meter. The meter is absent when there is no Lighthouse data, rather than sitting at zero.

The five KPI tiles.

A dash instead of a score means Lighthouse did not return that category, not that the site scored zero.

Action Required. Below the hero, an Action Required section headed N issues across M tools. Up to twelve issues are listed as status rows, each with a severity: HIGH in red, MEDIUM in amber, LOW in cyan. Work top down. High severity here means something that blocks crawling, breaks security or loses a page — a disallowed crawler, a redirect chain that drops to HTTP, an invalid required schema property. Medium items cost you ranking rather than access.

At the bottom of the panel is Get recommendations. Press it and Metric Vault writes a prioritized fix guide from the issues it found, with the reasoning and the steps for each. That call costs 1 credit. See Get Recommendations.

The action bar. Under the hero sits a row of buttons: Export PDF Report, Share Audit, Re-run Audit, Copy Summary, and a link to Open in Google PSI for the same URL. Copy Summary puts a plain-text digest on your clipboard — the score, the four category scores and the passed/issue counts — which is what to paste into a ticket.

The consolidated report header. The banded card above the per-tool blocks shows the URL you audited, VERIFIED FROM DATAFORSEO, US · Desktop, the report title Technical SEO Audit, and the line N of 11 analyses completed · powered by real DataForSEO + live LLM measurements. If that first number is below 11, some checks did not finish and the report is missing their findings.

The per-tool blocks. Below that, each of the eleven tools has a collapsible block holding its full result. The first successful one is open; the rest are collapsed so the same sub-headings do not repeat eleven times. Open the block for any issue you want the raw evidence for — the redirect hop list, the header grades, the schema validation errors.

A failed step shows its error text on the progress row and a matching gap in the report. Step exceeded 120s — rendered without it. means that check was slower than the workflow's patience, usually PageSpeed on a heavy site. Re-running often succeeds, because the underlying result may now be cached.

Examples#

Screenshots#

Tips#

• Audit a real landing page, not just the home page. Templates differ, and the home page is usually the best-maintained URL on the site.
• Re-run after every deploy. It is free, so there is no reason to ration it.
• Copy Summary is the fastest way to open a ticket with the numbers attached.
• If PageSpeed is the only failure, open Open in Google PSI and read it there; the rest of the audit is unaffected.
• Run this before any paid tool on a new site. There is no point buying keyword data for a site Google cannot crawl.

Best Practices#

• Fix in severity order, not in the order the tools are listed. High-severity items block everything downstream.
• Read the basis line under the score before reporting the score.
• Keep the exported PDF from the first audit. It is the before-picture for the work you are about to quote.
• Pair this with Site Audit when you need multi-page crawl data — this workflow examines one URL deeply, Site Audit samples the site broadly.
• Use Advanced Technical Checks when you only need hreflang, mixed content, redirects and tech stack; it is a smaller, faster version of four of these steps.

Common Mistakes#

• Reading 11/11 TOOLS PASSED as "no problems". It means all eleven checks ran. The Issues tile is the one that counts problems.
• Trusting a score built on a fallback basis. When PageSpeed is unavailable the number measures completion, not health.
• Auditing a URL behind a login. The checks fetch the page anonymously; a gated page returns the login screen and the audit describes that instead.
• Assuming a fixed issue is gone. Re-run; the panel is a snapshot of the run, not a live list.
• Expecting keyword or backlink data. This workflow is technical only.

Limitations#

• It audits one URL. It does not crawl the site.
• Lighthouse can fail or time out on heavy pages; the audit still renders without it, but the score's basis changes.
• Each step has a 120-second ceiling. A step past that is dropped from the report.
• Results are not held in the shared cache: every run is live. That is why it can be slower than a paid tool that returns a cached copy instantly.
• The report header always says US · Desktop. These checks are not country- or device-specific, so the country picker does not change them.
• The Action Required panel shows the first twelve issues. The rest are in the per-tool blocks.
• Anything that needs rendering JavaScript may be under-reported; the checks read the served HTML.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

Is it really free? Yes. All eleven underlying checks cost 0 credits, on every plan including Free. The only paid action on this screen is Get recommendations, at 1 credit.

How is this different from running the eleven tools individually? Only in effort. It is the same eleven tools with the same results, run from one input and combined into one score with one issue list. Running them separately costs the same — nothing — but takes eleven times as long.

How is this different from Site Audit? Site Audit samples many pages of a site and reports site-wide patterns; it costs 1 credit. This workflow examines one URL with eleven specialised checks and costs nothing. Use this first, then Site Audit when you need breadth. See Site Audit.

Why did my score change when nothing on the site changed? Lighthouse performance varies between runs — it is a live measurement on shared infrastructure. Treat small movements as noise and look at the issue list, which is far more stable.

Can I audit a staging site? Only if it is publicly reachable. Private, internal and loopback addresses are refused for security reasons. A password-protected staging site will return its login page.

Does the country picker change this audit? No. These are direct fetches of one URL; there is no market dimension to vary.