An SEO audit is a systematic review of everything that affects how a website is found and ranked in search: crawling, indexing, site architecture, page speed, mobile usability, content quality, internal links, backlinks and structured data. It produces a ranked list of problems and fixes. Running one before any SEO work starts prevents the classic mistake of writing new content for a site that search engines cannot properly crawl.
Why audit before doing anything else?
SEO work tends to start with whatever feels productive: new blog posts, new keywords, new links. But if half the site is blocked by robots.txt, if product pages carry a noindex tag left over from staging or if the main navigation is invisible to crawlers, none of that work counts.
An audit tells you which problems hold the site back most. It also gives you a baseline. Without one, you cannot show later whether rankings rose because of your work or because of a seasonal trend.
What tools do you need?
- Google Search Console: indexing status, coverage errors, Core Web Vitals, manual actions and search queries
- Bing Webmaster Tools: a second opinion on crawling and indexing
- Log file access, if available, to see which URLs Googlebot actually requests
- A crawler such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Sitebulb to see the site as a search engine does
- PageSpeed Insights and Chrome DevTools Lighthouse for performance
- Google Analytics 4 for traffic and engagement by landing page
- A backlink tool such as Ahrefs, Semrush or Majestic
- Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator for structured data
Free tools cover most of the audit for small sites. A paid crawler licence becomes worthwhile above a few hundred pages.
The checklist: crawling and indexing
Is the site being crawled correctly?
Start with robots.txt at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Check that it does not block important sections or resources such as CSS and JavaScript files. Then check the XML sitemap: it should list only indexable, canonical pages that return status 200, and it should be submitted in Search Console.
Run a full crawl. Look for broken internal links (404), redirect chains, redirect loops, pages that return 5xx errors and orphan pages that no internal link points to.
Are the right pages indexed?
In Search Console, open the Pages report under Indexing. Review the reasons pages are not indexed: “Crawled – currently not indexed”, “Discovered – currently not indexed”, “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”, “Excluded by noindex tag”. Each reason points to a different fix.
Compare the number of indexed pages with the number of pages you want indexed. A large gap in either direction is a finding. Too few means important pages are missing; too many usually means thin pages such as filters, tag archives or internal search results are being indexed.
Is the site architecture shallow enough?
Important pages should be reachable within a few clicks from the homepage. Check crawl depth in your crawler report. Pages buried at depth six or seven get crawled less and receive little internal link value.
Review the anchor text of internal links. Links that say “click here” or “read more” tell search engines nothing about the target page. Descriptive anchors such as “technical SEO checklist” help. Also check that the main navigation and category links are plain HTML links, not elements that only work after JavaScript runs.
Does the site meet page experience basics?
Google’s Core Web Vitals give clear thresholds for a good experience, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 2.5 seconds or less
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): 200 milliseconds or less
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): 0.1 or less
Check field data in Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report and PageSpeed Insights. Lab data from Lighthouse helps find causes: oversized images, render-blocking scripts, slow server response, web fonts loading late. Also confirm HTTPS is used everywhere, mixed content warnings are fixed and the site works well on mobile, because Google indexes the mobile version.
Test templates rather than single URLs. Run PageSpeed Insights on one example of each page type, such as the homepage, a category page, a product or service page and a blog post. Problems are almost always shared across a template, so one fix often improves hundreds of pages at once.
On-page and content checks
Titles, descriptions and headings
Export titles and meta descriptions from the crawler. Look for missing, duplicate, truncated or keyword-stuffed titles. Each indexable page should have a unique title that describes its content and a single clear H1.
Content quality and duplication
Group pages by type and check whether each one answers a specific search need. Look for thin pages with little original text, near-duplicate pages targeting the same keyword (cannibalisation) and outdated articles that still attract traffic but give old information. Search Console’s Performance report, filtered by query, shows when several URLs compete for the same term.
Structured data
Check that schema markup is valid and matches visible content: Organization, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, FAQ or LocalBusiness where relevant. Invalid or misleading markup can lose rich results.
How healthy is the backlink profile?
Review referring domains rather than total links. Look at the trend over time, the share of links from relevant sites and the anchor text distribution. A profile dominated by exact-match commercial anchors or links from unrelated, low-quality sites is a risk. Check Search Console’s Manual actions report to confirm there is no penalty.
Also find broken backlinks: external links that point to pages on your site that now return 404. Redirecting those URLs to the closest relevant page recovers value you already earned.
How do you prioritise the findings?
An audit can produce hundreds of issues. Rank them by impact and effort.
- Critical: anything that blocks crawling or indexing of important pages, such as robots.txt blocks, wrong noindex tags, wrong canonicals or server errors
- High: Core Web Vitals failures on key templates, broken internal links in navigation, duplicate titles on money pages
- Medium: thin or cannibalising content, weak internal linking, missing structured data
- Low: minor title length issues, image alt text on old posts, cosmetic redirect chains
Fix by template, not by page. If product page titles are poorly generated, change the template once rather than editing two thousand products by hand.
Give each finding an owner and a date. Technical fixes usually go to a developer, content fixes to editors and link issues to whoever runs outreach. An audit without owners becomes a document people agree with and nobody acts on.
After the fixes go live, request recrawling of key URLs through URL Inspection in Search Console and re-run the crawl a month later. Compare the new results with the baseline so the audit shows its own effect.
Where to start this week
Open Search Console and read the Pages report under Indexing. Write down the three largest reasons for non-indexed pages and check five example URLs for each. Then run a crawl of up to 500 URLs with the free version of Screaming Frog. Those two steps usually reveal the most expensive problems in under a day, before any content or link budget is spent.
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