An SEO audit is just a structured look at why your site ranks where it does and what is holding it back. Agencies wrap it in mystique, but the checks themselves are knowable. This is the checklist we run on every site, organized into technical, on-page, content, and local, in the order that finds problems fastest. Work through it and you will know more about your site than most owners ever learn.
Before you start: get the data
Two free tools give you almost everything you need. Set up Google Search Console if you have not already, and open your analytics. Without data you are guessing; with it, every check below has an answer.
Technical checks (do these first)
Technical problems cap everything else, which is why they come first.
- Is the site indexed? Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If pages you care about are missing, nothing else matters until they are indexed.
- Does the site load fast on a phone? Test your homepage and a key service page with PageSpeed Insights. Slow mobile pages lose both rankings and customers.
- Is there exactly one version of the site? http vs https, www vs non-www, trailing slash vs none. Every variant should redirect to one canonical version.
- Does robots.txt block anything important? One wrong line here can hide your whole site. Check yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
- Is there an XML sitemap, and is it submitted? It should list every page you want ranked and nothing you do not.
- Any broken pages or links? Crawl the site with a free crawler and fix 404s, redirect chains, and links to dead pages.
- Is the site usable on mobile? Google ranks the mobile version. Tap targets, readable text, no sideways scrolling.
- Is HTTPS working everywhere? No mixed-content warnings, no pages served over plain http.
If several of these fail, a proper technical SEO audit is the highest value work you can buy, because every other effort is throttled until the foundation is fixed.
On-page checks
- Does every important page target one clear search term? A page trying to rank for everything ranks for nothing.
- Are title tags unique and descriptive? Keyword near the front, under about 60 characters, written to earn the click.
- Does every page have exactly one h1? And do the headings below it follow a logical order?
- Are meta descriptions written, unique, and persuasive? They do not affect rankings directly, but they change how many people click.
- Do images have descriptive alt text and compressed file sizes? Huge images are the most common speed problem on small sites.
- Are URLs short and readable? /services/roof-repair beats /page?id=1742.
Content checks
- Does a page exist for every service you sell? If plumbing repairs and water heater installs share one page, you are splitting your chances of ranking for both.
- Does the content answer what a customer would ask? Read your service page as a stranger. Price signals, process, proof, and a clear next step.
- Is anything thin or duplicated? Pages with a few sentences, or near-copies of each other, drag the whole site down. See our guide to duplicate content.
- Is anything outdated? Old prices, closed locations, staff who left. Google notices freshness; customers notice more.
- Do pages link to each other with descriptive anchors? Internal links are a free ranking lever most sites ignore.
Local checks (if you serve local customers)
- Is your Google Business Profile claimed and complete? Categories, services, photos, hours. Our GBP checklist covers every field.
- Are your name, address, and phone consistent everywhere? Your site, your profile, and directories must match exactly.
- Are you earning reviews steadily? A trickle of recent reviews beats a pile of old ones.
- Does your site name the areas you serve? Google cannot rank you in a town your site never mentions.
Authority checks
- Who links to you? Check Search Console's links report. A handful of real local and industry links beats hundreds of junk directory listings.
- Who links to the competitors beating you? The gap between their link profile and yours is usually the size of the hill you have to climb.
Turning findings into a plan
An audit is only useful if it ends in an ordered list. Rank what you found by two questions: how much is this costing us, and how hard is it to fix? Indexing problems and site-wide technical issues come first, because they cap everything. Quick on-page wins on pages that already rank on page two come next, because small pushes there pay back fastest. New content and link earning follow, because they compound but take longer.
Expect the fixes to take weeks, not days, and re-check your data monthly rather than daily. SEO rewards steady pressure over bursts.
What the findings usually mean
After enough audits, patterns repeat. A few translations from symptom to cause that will save you diagnostic time:
- "We rank for our name and nothing else." Usually thin service pages: one page listing every service instead of a real page per service. The fix is content, not tricks.
- "Traffic fell off a cliff on a specific date." Either a technical accident (check for noindex and robots.txt first), a redesign that dropped URLs, or an algorithm update. The date tells you which: match it against your own change log before blaming Google.
- "We get traffic but no calls." Not an SEO problem in the ranking sense: the pages rank for the wrong intent, or they rank fine and fail to convince. Read your top pages as a skeptical stranger.
- "Competitors with worse websites outrank us." Almost always authority and local signals: more reviews, more real links, a stronger profile. Their site is worse; their reputation footprint is better.
- "We rank in our town but nowhere else." Expected, unless you build pages for the other places. See how in our service area SEO guide.
How often should you audit?
A full pass like this twice a year is enough for most small sites, with two exceptions that warrant an immediate audit: after any redesign, migration, or platform change, and after any sudden traffic drop. In between, a monthly 20-minute check of Search Console (indexing, top queries, Core Web Vitals status) catches most new problems while they are cheap. Put the six-month audit in the calendar now; the sites that decay are the ones nobody looked at.
Keep each audit's findings and dates in the same spreadsheet. The comparison across audits is itself diagnostic: problems that recur point at process (images never compressed, titles never written), and fixing the process beats fixing the symptom a third time.
Want it done for you?
This checklist is genuinely enough to self-audit. If you would rather have an experienced eye run it, our free SEO audit is exactly that: a person works through these checks on your site and sends you the prioritized findings within three business days, no strings attached. Either way, the worst option is not looking at all.