The Short Answer
A technical SEO audit systematically checks everything that affects whether search engines and AI systems can properly crawl, understand, and rank your website: site speed and Core Web Vitals, schema markup presence and accuracy, mobile usability, crawlability (robots.txt, sitemap, broken links), URL structure, and content indexability. This is exactly the technical foundation covered on our AI website design for Toronto law firms page. For a Toronto law firm, this audit is the diagnostic step that should happen before any SEO strategy is built — you can't fix what you haven't measured.
Site Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google measures loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability as direct ranking factors, evaluated primarily on mobile since Google indexes mobile-first by default. An audit checks your actual PageSpeed Insights scores, not just a general impression of whether the site "feels fast" — see how to test mobile-friendliness for the hands-on version of this check.
Schema Markup and Structured Data
The audit checks which schema types are present (LegalService, Attorney, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList) and — critically — whether the schema matches the visible content exactly. Mismatched schema (an FAQ block listing questions that don't match what's visibly on the page) can actively work against a site rather than simply doing nothing. See what schema markup actually does for the full breakdown of what good implementation looks like.
Core Technical Audit Checklist
Crawlability and Indexability Issues Most Firms Never Check
A significant share of Toronto law firm websites have crawlability issues their owners have never discovered — pages accidentally blocked by robots.txt, missing or outdated XML sitemaps, broken internal links creating dead ends, or duplicate content confusing which version of a page Google should actually index. None of these are visible to a casual look at the live website; they only surface through a proper technical audit using tools like Google Search Console.
A beautiful, well-written website that Google can't properly crawl is invisible regardless of content quality. Technical SEO is the foundation everything else sits on — check it first, not last.
James Harmiden · Founder & CEO, Lexscale.ai
One Piece of a Larger Puzzle
Think of this as one piece of a larger puzzle for a Toronto law firm. The adjacent pieces are What Keywords Should a Toronto Law Firm Target for SEO?, How Often Should a Toronto Law Firm Blog for SEO?, How Do Toronto Law Firms Build Backlinks Ethically?, and Do Legal Directories Like Avvo and Justia Still Help SEO for Toronto Firms? — and a bit further out, What Should a Toronto Firm Look for When Hiring an SEO Agency?, How Much Does Google Ads (PPC) Cost for a Law Firm in Toronto?, and Are Facebook and Meta Ads Worth It for a Toronto Law Firm?. The Toronto growth hub shows how all of it connects, with AI Website Design for Toronto Law Firms and AI SEO for Toronto Law Firms as the two services underneath.