SEO Audit Checklist

Most SEO audits are a hundred-item spreadsheet nobody acts on.

The problem is not thoroughness, it is sequence. An audit that opens with keyword density and closes with indexation has buried the expensive problem under thirty cheap ones.

This runs in the order we actually use. Each layer is worth finishing before you start the next, because a failure high up makes everything below it moot. Definitions for anything unfamiliar live in our SEO guide.

Layer 1 — Indexation (checks 1–6)

Start here every time. If Google cannot see the site, nothing else on this page matters.

1. Open your robots.txt in a browser. A staging block that reached production is the single most expensive two lines in SEO, and it goes unnoticed for weeks.
2. Compare indexed pages against published pages. Search Console's Pages report versus your sitemap count. A large gap is the finding.
3. Read the "Why pages aren't indexed" list. "Discovered — currently not indexed" and "Crawled — currently not indexed" mean different things and need different fixes.
4. Check the sitemap contains only canonical, indexable URLs. Redirects and noindexed pages in a sitemap send contradictory signals.
5. Spot-check five important pages with URL Inspection. Compare the canonical you declared with the one Google selected. A mismatch means a signal conflict — see canonical tags.
6. Confirm the sitemap has actually regenerated recently. A stale sitemap quietly hides every page published since it last rebuilt.

Layer 2 — Technical health (checks 7–14)

1. Mobile Core Web Vitals in Search Console. Field data, not your Lighthouse score. Fix by template rather than by URL.
2. Check INP specifically. It replaced First Input Delay in 2024 and is where most sites now fail. The usual culprit is third-party JavaScript.
3. Find redirect chains. Every extra hop leaks a little and wastes a crawl.
4. Look for soft 404s. Pages returning 200 while showing nothing useful.
5. Confirm one version of the site resolves. https, non-www, trailing slash — pick one and redirect the rest.
6. Check duplicate URLs from parameters. Tracking tags and filters multiply URLs fast, especially on ecommerce.
7. Assess crawl budget only if you are large. Under about 10,000 URLs this is almost never your problem — skip it and move on.
8. Validate structured data. Check what actually still earns a rich result; FAQ and HowTo markup no longer do. Build valid blocks with the schema generator.

Layer 3 — On-page (checks 15–21)

1. One page per topic. Find pages competing for the same query and merge or differentiate them. This is the highest-value on-page fix and almost nobody runs it.
2. Titles that describe the page and carry the term. Preview them with the SERP snippet preview before you ship.
3. Meta descriptions on pages ranking 5–20. These are the pages where a better snippet changes clicks — see how to write meta descriptions.
4. One H1 per page, and a heading structure that follows the argument rather than the design.
5. A direct answer in the first 60 words of anything informational. This is what earns snippets and AI citations.
6. Image alt text that describes the image, not the keyword.
7. Search intent match. Open the SERP for your five most important terms and compare the page type that ranks with the page type you built. A mismatch cannot be fixed by optimisation.

Layer 4 — Content and internal links (checks 22–27)

1. Find orphan pages. Anything with zero inbound internal links. These already exist and currently earn nothing.
2. Find pages ranking 11–25 in Search Console and add internal links to them from stronger pages. Fastest available win.
3. Audit your internal anchors. Every "read more" is a wasted relevance signal.
4. Identify thin pages that exist but answer nothing. Merge, expand or remove them.
5. Check content freshness on anything with a year in it or a price in it.
6. Confirm every hub links to 100% of its children. An unlinked child is an orphan whatever the sitemap says.

Layer 5 — Off-page (checks 28–30)

1. Review your inbound anchor distribution. If one commercial phrase dominates, that is a risk rather than a win.
2. Check for links you did not earn. Sudden volumes of low-quality links are worth knowing about even if you do nothing.
3. Compare referring domains against two real competitors — not to copy them, but to see whether you are in the same league or a different one. Tactics in link building.

What to do with the findings

An audit is only worth the hours if it produces a sequence. Sort what you found into three buckets:

Anything that does not fit one of those three is probably not worth doing. That is the honest use of a checklist — not to complete it, but to find the four things on it that matter for your site.

Do you need a paid tool?

Every check on this page can be done with Search Console and a browser, which is genuinely how we would start.

Where a paid crawler earns its money is scale: finding orphan pages, redirect chains and duplicate titles across a few thousand URLs is not a manual job. Under a hundred pages, you do not need one. Over a thousand, you do.