Technical SEO Audit & Meta Tags Matrix Markdown Table Template

When to Use This Table

Formatting This Table in Markdown

A technical seo audit & meta tags matrix table puts a few things in cells that Markdown treats as syntax. These are the ones to watch so it renders correctly on GitHub, GitLab, Obsidian and docs sites.

• Page titles often contain a pipe

  Title tags such as “Pricing | Acme” contain |, which splits the cell even inside a code span. Write Pricing \| Acme in the source and renderers show a plain bar.

• Keep text out of the character-count columns

  The template puts Missing in the meta description count column, which breaks scanning of right-aligned digits. Use 0 or — and put the reason in a notes column, and bold counts outside your limits (**71**) since colour is stripped.

• Use ✓ and ✗ characters, not task-list syntax

  GitHub does not render [x] in table cells, so the canonical column uses ✓ and ✗ text. Pair each mark with a word (✓ Self) and use one set throughout, since ✓ and ✅ look different and may use different fonts; see checkmarks.

• Code-span URLs you want to compare exactly

  Bare https:// URLs in a cell are autolinked, which hides the difference between http:// and https:// or a missing trailing slash. Put canonical targets in code spans, and give only the path (as in /pricing/) with the host stated once above the table.

What Goes in Each Column

How to Fill It In

1. 1Export URLs from the XML sitemap and from a full crawl (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or a script) with JavaScript rendering on. Sitemap URLs no link reaches, and crawlable URLs missing from the sitemap, are both findings.
2. 2Read titles, descriptions, canonicals, and robots directives from the crawler’s rendered-HTML export, not from source files or the CMS, because frameworks append suffixes and scripts can rewrite the head after load.
3. 3Pull primary keywords from Search Console’s Performance report filtered by page: the queries that already earn impressions for that URL are better evidence than a keyword tool’s guess.
4. 4For every canonical that is not a self-reference and every page in doubt, run URL Inspection in Search Console and record the Google-selected canonical next to the declared one.
5. 5Note the crawl date and tool above the table, re-crawl after fixes ship, and keep both tables in the ticket as the audit trail. A diff of the two tables shows exactly what changed.

Ready-to-Paste Variations

| URL | HTTP status | Robots directive | Declared canonical | Google-selected canonical | Search Console status |
| :--- | :---: | :---: | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| `/templates/` | 200 | indexable | self | self | Indexed |
| `/templates` | 308 | — | — | — | Page with redirect |
| `/search/?q=table` | 200 | `noindex` | self | — | Excluded by noindex tag |
| `/syntax/old-guide/` | 404 | — | — | — | Not found (404) |
| `/guides/tables/?ref=nav` | 200 | indexable | `/guides/tables/` | `/guides/tables/` | Alternate page with proper canonical tag |

| Page template | LCP (p75) | INP (p75) | CLS (p75) | Status |
| :--- | ---: | ---: | ---: | :---: |
| “Good” threshold | ≤ 2.5 s | ≤ 200 ms | ≤ 0.1 | — |
| Home | 2.1 s | 140 ms | 0.02 | ✅ Good |
| Template detail | 3.4 s | 180 ms | 0.15 | ⚠️ Needs work |
| Converter tool | 1.8 s | 260 ms | 0.01 | ⚠️ Needs work |

| Old URL | Status | New URL | Hops | Check |
| :--- | :---: | :--- | :---: | :---: |
| `/table-generator.html` | 301 | `/markdown-table-generator/` | 1 | ✅ |
| `/docs/syntax` | 301 | `/syntax/` | 2 | ⚠️ Chain |
| `/blog/2019/tables` | 302 | `/` | 1 | ❌ Temporary, to home |

Common Mistakes

• Treating 60 and 160 characters as limits Google enforces.

  They are rules of thumb. Google truncates by pixel width and rewrites title links it finds unhelpful, so put the distinguishing words first and spend effort on duplicated or empty titles, not on ones that run to 63 characters.

• Using robots.txt Disallow to remove pages from the index.

  A blocked URL can still be indexed from links, and Google cannot see a noindex on a page it is not allowed to crawl. Allow crawling, serve noindex, wait until the page drops out, and only then block it if crawl budget matters.

• Ticking the canonical column because a tag exists.

  Compare the target string character by character. A canonical pointing at the http:// version, a missing trailing slash, or a staging hostname is worse than no tag, and these come from environment variables that differ between builds.

• Auditing meta keywords or stuffing variants of the target phrase into the title.

  Google does not use the meta keywords tag. Drop that column entirely, write one natural title per page, and check the keyword column for two URLs targeting the same query.

• Adding FAQ or HowTo structured data to every template to win rich results.

  Since 2023, FAQ rich results are shown only for well-known authoritative government and health sites, and HowTo rich results were removed. Audit structured data that can still produce a result for your page type, and validate it with the Rich Results Test.