Why Technical SEO Audits Matter for Nonprofits

Technical SEO problems are invisible to the people visiting your website but clearly visible to search engines. A page that looks fine in a browser might have a broken canonical tag, missing alt text, or crawl errors that prevent indexing. It might also be slow: Google states that Core Web Vitals "are used by our ranking systems" (Search Central, 2025).

For nonprofits, technical SEO audits are particularly important because most charity websites are built and then left without systematic technical review. Content gets added, plugins are installed, domains migrate, and the technical foundations quietly degrade.

Before You Start: The Right Tools

A technical SEO audit needs tools that crawl your site the way search engines do:

  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider: The industry standard for site crawls. Free up to 500 URLs; paid beyond that. Identifies broken links, redirect chains, missing meta data and duplicate content. Essential for any meaningful audit.
  • Google Search Console: Free and provided by Google itself. Shows crawl errors, indexing problems, Core Web Vitals data, and which pages are (or aren’t) indexed. Should be set up on every live site.
  • PageSpeed Insights: Free from Google; page performance and Core Web Vitals, mobile and desktop.
  • WAVE or Axe: Accessibility checkers. Not strictly SEO tools, but they catch the same alt text and heading faults.
  • Ahrefs or Semrush: Paid tools for backlink analysis and keyword tracking. Useful for a comprehensive audit, not essential for a technical-only review.

Phase 1: Crawl the Site

Start with a Screaming Frog crawl. This gives you a complete picture of every URL the crawler finds, with data on status codes, meta data, heading structure, and more.

Configuration before crawling:

  • Set your user agent to Googlebot to simulate how Google crawls
  • Check that JavaScript rendering is enabled if your site uses it heavily
  • Add your sitemap URL so Screaming Frog can compare crawled URLs against submitted URLs

Phase 2: Indexation and Coverage

Check What’s Being Indexed

In Google Search Console, open the Page indexing report, which shows "which pages Google can find and index on your site". Look at:

  • Indexed pages: How many pages are indexed? Does this match how many pages you expect to be indexable?
  • Not indexed, with an error: Pages that should be indexed but aren’t
  • Not indexed, by reason: noindex tags, redirect targets, crawl anomalies, duplicates

robots.txt

Check your robots.txt file (yourdomain.com/robots.txt) for any rules that might be inadvertently blocking search engine access to important pages. Common issues:

Noindex Tags

In Screaming Frog, filter for pages with meta robots "noindex" directives. Verify that every page marked noindex should be marked noindex. It’s surprisingly common to find important pages accidentally noindexed, particularly after a site migration or CMS change.

Canonical Tags

Canonical tags tell search engines which version of a URL is the preferred version when multiple URLs have similar content. Google treats rel="canonical" as "a strong signal" rather than a directive, and says a site "will likely do just fine without specifying a canonical preference" (Search Central, 2026). Check that:

  • The canonical tag points to the correct URL (self-referencing on non-duplicate pages)
  • Paginated content and filtered views have appropriate canonicals
  • There are no canonical chains (canonical pointing to a page that itself has a different canonical)

Phase 3: On-Page Technical Elements

Title Tags

In Screaming Frog, filter by title tag data. Check for:

  • Missing title tags
  • Duplicate title tags across multiple pages
  • Title tags too short to describe the page
  • Title tags that are just the site name repeated

Not a character count, though. Google says "there's no limit on how long a <title> element can be" and that the title link is truncated "typically to fit the device width" (Search Central, 2025). The <title> is only one of several sources it uses.

Meta Descriptions

Same process, with the same caveat about length:

  • Missing meta descriptions
  • Duplicate meta descriptions
  • Descriptions that are keyword strings rather than a readable summary

Google "sometimes uses the meta description HTML element" when it describes the page better than the page's own text, and again there is "no limit on how long a meta description can be" (Search Central, 2026).

Heading Structure

  • Pages missing a heading that names what the page is about
  • Headings that are decorative styling rather than real heading elements
  • Sections of body copy with no heading at all

Be careful what you infer. Google's starter guide says there is "no magical, ideal amount of headings a given page should have", and that "Google Search can rarely depend on semantic meanings hidden in the HTML specification" (Search Central, 2025). A second H1, or a jump from H1 to H3, matters to readers and to screen-reader users. It is not a documented Search penalty.

In Webflow, heading levels need to be set in element settings, not just styled visually. A common issue is text styled to look like a heading but set as a paragraph element.

Image Alt Text

Filter for images missing alt text. This is both an SEO issue and an accessibility requirement: WCAG 2.2 success criterion 1.1.1 Non-text Content is Level A, so it is required at AA as well, and it means every informative image needs a text alternative.

For full accessibility requirements, see my guide on WCAG AA compliance for nonprofit websites.

Screaming Frog identifies all internal 404 errors. Fix these by either correcting the link or implementing a redirect.

External broken links are a credibility issue, especially on pages that reference sector resources or partner organisations.

Redirect Chains and Loops

Filter for 3xx redirects and look for chains (A redirects to B redirects to C) and loops (A redirects to B which redirects back to A). Google's guidance is to "avoid long redirect chains, which have a negative effect on crawling". Resolve chains to point directly to the final destination. Crawl budget itself is unlikely to be your problem: that guide is written for sites with a million or more unique pages changing weekly, or 10,000 or more changing daily, and says that if yours "doesn't have a large number of pages that change rapidly ... you don't need to read this guide".

For a comprehensive guide to managing redirects, particularly during site migrations, see my article on 301 redirects for nonprofit website migrations.

Which pages have the most internal links pointing to them? Check that your most strategically important pages (services, key resources, donation page) are appropriately interlinked from other content, which is the practical side of building topical authority.

Phase 5: Performance and Core Web Vitals

Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and several key landing pages. Look at both mobile and desktop scores separately.

The Core Web Vitals thresholds (web.dev, 2024), each assessed at the 75th percentile of page loads:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long it takes for the main content to load. Good: within 2.5 seconds.
  • Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Responsiveness to user interactions. Good: 200ms or less.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much the page shifts as elements load. Good: 0.1 or less.

Common performance issues on nonprofit Webflow sites:

  • Unoptimised images (large file sizes, wrong formats)
  • Animation libraries (GSAP, Lottie) loaded on pages that don’t need them
  • Third-party scripts (analytics, chatbots, donation widgets) that add significant load time
  • Webflow Interactions that trigger unnecessary repaints

Phase 6: Mobile and Structured Data

Mobile Usability

Search Console no longer carries a Mobile Usability report. Google stripped it, and the Mobile Friendly Test, out of its documentation on 1 December 2023, "as they are going away" (Search Central, 2023). Google's page experience guidance now points instead to Chrome Lighthouse, which "can help you identify a range of improvements to make related to page experience, including mobile usability" (Search Central, 2025). Look for the familiar faults: text too small to read, tap targets too close together, content wider than the screen.

In Webflow, mobile responsiveness requires explicit design work at each breakpoint. It doesn’t happen automatically.

Structured Data

Check your structured data implementation using Google’s Rich Results Test. Are the schema types you’ve implemented valid? Are there errors or warnings?

For nonprofits that haven’t yet implemented schema, this audit is a prompt to start. See my guide on schema markup for nonprofits for implementation guidance.

Prioritising What You Find

A technical audit typically surfaces more issues than can be addressed immediately. Prioritise by impact:

Fix immediately: Indexation errors, broken canonical tags, pages accidentally noindexed, broken forms, missing HTTPS.

Fix in the next sprint: Missing title tags, duplicate meta descriptions, broken internal links, redirect chains, significant performance issues.

Plan for: Image optimisation programme, heading structure corrections, schema implementation, alt text completion.

Monitor ongoing: New broken links (especially for sites with frequent content changes), Core Web Vitals in Search Console, indexing changes.

Audit Frequency

For most nonprofit sites, a comprehensive technical audit once or twice a year is appropriate, with lighter monthly checks on Search Console data. Sites that publish frequently or have ongoing migration work need more frequent reviews.

This audit framework feeds into the broader SEO approach I describe in my guide on SEO for nonprofit websites, and the pre-launch version of these checks is covered in the pre-launch checklist.

If you’d prefer a structured audit done for you rather than conducting one yourself, the Blueprint Audit covers technical SEO alongside accessibility, governance, and content as an integrated assessment of your site’s current state.