How to Do an SEO Audit

What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a structured evaluation of a website to identify the issues preventing it from ranking as well as it could in search engines, and the opportunities it is not yet capturing. A good SEO audit covers three main areas: technical SEO (can search engines access and index the site's content properly), on-page content (is the content well-optimised for the target keywords and search intents), and off-page authority (does the site have the backlink profile needed to compete for its target terms).

The output of a useful SEO audit is not a list of every issue found. It is a prioritised action plan that tells you which issues matter most, why they matter, and what needs to happen to fix them. An audit that lists 300 issues without prioritising them is not actionable. A prioritised plan with 20 high-impact recommendations is far more valuable.

How to Do an SEO Audit: The Tools You Need

A thorough SEO audit requires a combination of tools. Here are the core ones:

• Google Search Console: Free. Essential for understanding how Google currently sees the site. Shows indexation issues, coverage problems, Core Web Vitals data, keyword positions, and any manual actions.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Crawls the site and collects data on every URL, including meta data, response codes, canonical tags, internal links, and structured data. Free up to 500 URLs, paid for larger sites.
• Ahrefs or SEMrush: Paid tools that provide backlink analysis, keyword positioning data, competitor research, and organic traffic estimates. Both are full and either will serve for an audit.
• Google PageSpeed Insights / Lighthouse: Measures Core Web Vitals and page speed for specific URLs. Free. Provides specific recommendations for improvement.
• Google Analytics: Traffic and engagement data. Useful for identifying pages with high traffic but poor conversion, or pages that previously drove traffic but have declined.

Step 1: Technical SEO Audit

Start with technical SEO. Technical issues can prevent even excellent content from ranking, so they need to be identified and prioritised before the content and authority work.

Check Crawlability and Indexation

Open Google Search Console and go to Index >. Pages. Look at the breakdown of indexed and non-indexed URLs. The non-indexed section shows why pages are not being indexed: crawled but not indexed (Google chose not to index), noindexed (explicitly excluded), blocked by robots.txt, or 404 errors.

For pages that should be indexed but are not, investigate the cause. A noindex tag on important pages is a critical issue. Pages blocked by robots.txt that should be accessible is a critical issue. Crawled but not indexed at scale often indicates thin content or duplicate content problems.

Run a Screaming Frog crawl of the site to map the full page inventory. Cross-reference with Search Console to identify discrepancies between what Screaming Frog finds and what Google has indexed.

Site Speed and Core Web Vitals

In Search Console, go to Experience >. Core Web Vitals. Check how many URLs pass, need improvement, or fail for both mobile and desktop. Failing Core Web Vitals on key pages is a ranking factor issue that needs addressing.

Run PageSpeed Insights on the homepage and a representative sample of important pages. Note the specific issues flagged: render-blocking resources, unoptimised images, unnecessary JavaScript, poor server response times. These are the areas where speed improvements are available.

Technical SEO Issues to Check

• Duplicate content: are there multiple URLs serving the same or very similar content? Check for www vs. non-www, HTTP vs. HTTPS, trailing slash vs. no trailing slash.
• Canonical tags: are canonical tags implemented correctly? Are they self-referencing on canonical pages and pointing to the right URL on duplicate or near-duplicate pages?
• Redirect chains and loops: use Screaming Frog to identify redirect chains (where a redirect points to another redirect). These should be consolidated to direct 301 redirects.
• Internal linking: which pages have the most internal links pointing to them? Does this align with the pages that should have the most authority? Orphan pages (pages with no internal links) will not rank well.
• HTTPS: is the entire site served over HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate? Are there mixed content issues (HTTPS pages loading HTTP resources)?
• XML sitemap: is there a clean XML sitemap submitted to Search Console? Does it include only canonical, indexable URLs?

Step 2: Content Audit

After technical issues, review the site's content. The content audit answers two questions: are the right pages being optimised for the right keywords, and are there pages that are underperforming or actively hurting the site?

Keyword Mapping

Use Ahrefs or SEMrush to see which keywords the site currently ranks for and which positions those keywords occupy. Cross-reference with the site's page inventory to identify: pages that have no clear keyword focus. keywords the site ranks for in positions 5-20 that could be moved to top 3 with optimisation. and keyword opportunities the site is not targeting at all.

For each important service or category page, check that the page is targeting the right primary keyword and that the content matches the search intent for that keyword. A page targeting "digital marketing services" where the content is mostly about company history is misaligned with search intent.

Content Quality Assessment

Review the site's content against the standard Google expects: is it genuinely useful and substantive, or is it thin and generic? Thin content (short pages with little information value) can suppress rankings across the site if present at scale. Identify pages with very low word counts, high bounce rates in Analytics, or no organic traffic that should be improved or removed.

Check for content cannibalisation: multiple pages targeting the same or very similar keywords. When two pages compete for the same keyword, Google has to choose between them and often ranks neither well. Pages targeting overlapping terms should be consolidated.

SEO Audit: Meta Data Review

Screaming Frog's export of title tags and meta descriptions makes it easy to spot: missing titles or descriptions, duplicate titles or descriptions across pages, titles that are too long or too short, and titles that do not include the target keyword. Each page should have a unique, descriptive title tag of 50-60 characters that includes the primary keyword.

Step 3: Backlink Profile Audit

Use Ahrefs Site Explorer or SEMrush Backlink Analytics to review the site's backlink profile. Key things to assess:

• Domain Rating / Domain Authority: How does the site's overall authority compare to competitors for the target keywords?
• Link quality: Are the site's backlinks from relevant, credible sources? Or are there signs of low-quality or spammy links from irrelevant directories or link farms?
• Anchor text distribution: Is there a natural distribution of branded anchors, generic anchors, and keyword-rich anchors? Over-optimised anchor text (too many exact-match keyword anchors) can be a risk signal.
• Lost links: Has the site lost significant backlinks recently? If so, why, and should those links be reclaimed?
• Competitor comparison: How does the backlink profile compare to the sites ranking above it for the most important keywords? What is the gap that needs to be closed?

Step 4: Competitive Analysis

Understanding what competitors are doing is part of a complete SEO audit. For the most important target keywords, analyse the sites currently ranking in the top 3-5 positions: how much content do they have on the topic, how authoritative are they, and what are they doing that this site is not?

Competitor analysis identifies both the size of the gap to close and the specific areas where closing that gap is most feasible. A small gap in content depth is easier to close than a large gap in domain authority.

Prioritising Your SEO Audit Findings

After completing the audit, prioritise findings by expected impact and implementation effort. High-impact issues that are straightforward to implement come first. High-impact issues that require significant development work need to be planned and resourced. Lower-impact issues go in the backlog for later.

A prioritisation framework that works well: Critical (must fix immediately) / High priority (address in the next 30 days) / Medium priority (address in 30-90 days) / Backlog (address when higher-priority items are complete). A typical site will have 5-10 critical issues, 10-20 high-priority improvements, and a longer backlog of smaller items.

"An SEO audit is only as valuable as the action plan it produces. A list of issues without prioritisation is not an audit. it is a data dump."

If you want a professional SEO audit conducted by a specialist with over twelve years of experience, see my SEO audit service. I deliver audits as prioritised action plans with developer-ready recommendations, not data dumps. For information about my broader technical SEO consultant work, visit that page.