Due to high probability of blade faults, bearing faults, sensor faults, and communication faults in pitch systems during the long-term operation of wind turbine components, and the complex operation environment which increases the uncertainty of fault types, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis method for wind turbine components based on an Improved Dung Beetle Optimization (IDBO) algorithm to optimize Support Vector Machine (SVM). Firstly, the Halton sequence is initially employed to populate the population, effectively mitigating the issue of local optima. Secondly, the subtraction averaging optimization strategy is introduced to accelerate the dung beetle algorithm in solving complex problems and improve its global optimization ability. Finally, incorporating smooth development variation helps improve data quality and the accuracy of the model. The experimental results indicate that the IDBO-optimized SVM (IDBO-SVM) achieves a 96.7% fault diagnosis rate for wind turbine components. With the proposed IDBO-SVM method, fault diagnosis of wind turbine components is more accurate and stable, and its practical application is excellent.