An SEO audit is an inspection of a website that shows what is keeping it from appearing in search and what to fix first. This guide explains what an audit checks, which tools are used and how the findings are put in order of importance.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit goes through a website’s technology, content and trustworthiness and compares them with what search engines and searchers need. The result of a good audit is not a long list of errors but a short plan: what is done, in what order and why.

When an audit is worth doing

  • Before SEO work begins.
  • Before a redesign and straight after it.
  • When search traffic has changed and the reason is unclear.
  • When a lot of content has built up on the site over the years.
  • Regularly, for example once a year.

What an audit checks

  • Technology: indexing, robots.txt, the sitemap, canonical addresses, redirects, speed and mobile. See the technical SEO guide.
  • Content: whether every important page answers one search, whether pages overlap and whether a subject is missing altogether. See the content strategy guide.
  • On-page elements: the title, meta description, headings, images and internal links.
  • Trust: author details, company details, schema markup and external links.
  • AI visibility: whether AI crawlers can reach the pages and whether the company is mentioned in answers. See the generative engine optimization (GEO) guide.
  • Measurement: whether enquiries are recorded in analytics. See the conversion tracking guide.

The tools

  • Google Search Console shows indexing status, searches and clicks. It is the most important tool, and it is free.
  • A crawler tool goes through the site as a search crawler would and lists status codes, headings and links.
  • PageSpeed Insights shows the Core Web Vitals figures.
  • Analytics shows what visitors do on the site.
  • Google’s Rich Results Test checks schema markup.

A tool finds the anomalies but does not say which of them matter. That is a job for a person.

How the findings are put in order

Judge every finding with two questions: how much does it affect visibility or enquiries, and how much work does the fix take?

  • First the barriers: an important page is not in search, or the form does not work.
  • Then the content, title and headings of the most important pages.
  • After that structure, internal links and missing pages.
  • Last the fine-tuning that has a small effect.

The score a tool gives is not the goal. A site with a hundred small warnings can do well in search, and a site with one wrong noindex tag does not appear at all.

A quick audit you can do yourself

  • Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and see whether your most important pages appear.
  • Open the Pages report in Search Console and read why pages are not indexed.
  • In the Performance report, see which searches and pages bring the clicks.
  • Run your most important service page through PageSpeed Insights on mobile.
  • Read the top of the service page: is it clear what you offer and for whom?
  • Send the contact form yourself on a phone.

The most common findings

  • Two pages compete for the same search.
  • An important service has no page of its own.
  • Old addresses return a 404 error after a redesign.
  • The title and H1 do not say what the page offers.
  • Enquiries are not measured.

If you would like us to do this for you, the service is the SEO audit. The work that follows an audit is described in the search engine optimization (SEO) guide.

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