Website SEO Audit: How to Check Your SEO Step by Step

A website SEO audit is a systematic check that shows what is stopping your pages from ranking well in Google. It covers indexing, technical health, on-page elements, content and keywords, links and structured data. The result should not be a long list of errors, but a prioritized action plan ranked by impact on traffic and by effort.

The process in brief:

1. 1Indexing – use Google Search Console to see which pages Google knows about and why it leaves some out.
2. 2Technical health – HTTPS, speed, the mobile version, status codes, duplicates and canonical tags.
3. 3On-page elements – title, meta description and H1 heading on your key pages.
4. 4Content and keywords – every topic should have exactly one target page.
5. 5Links – internal linking, broken links and your backlink profile.
6. 6Structured data – valid markup and eligibility for rich results.
7. 7Report – rank findings by impact and effort and start with what brings the most for the least work.

What you need for an SEO audit

You can run a basic audit with free tools. What matters most is access to data only the site owner can see:

• Google Search Console – indexing, search queries, errors and links, straight from Google.
• A crawler – software that walks through your site the way a search engine does. Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs for free, the paid licence removes the limit.
• Lighthouse – a free, open-source Google tool in Chrome DevTools and PageSpeed Insights, with an SEO category.
• Analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) – to see which pages bring enquiries and deserve priority.

Step 1: Indexing – can Google see your pages?

Indexing comes first: a page that is not in Google’s index brings no traffic.

Start with the Page indexing report in Google Search Console. It shows how many URLs are indexed and why the rest are not – for example a server error, a noindex tag, a robots.txt block, a 404 or a so-called soft 404. “Not indexed” does not automatically mean a problem: duplicates, redirected pages and pages you excluded on purpose should stay out of the index. Look for important pages that are missing. Check individual URLs with the URL Inspection tool.

A quick site:yourdomain.com search gives you a rough picture. Google itself states that the site: operator does not return every indexed URL, so do not treat the number of results as an exact count.

Robots.txt and SEO

The robots.txt file tells crawlers where they may go. It controls crawling, not indexing. A page disallowed in robots.txt can still appear in Google if other sites link to it. If you want a page out of search results, use a noindex tag – and noindex only works if the crawler is allowed to fetch the page. Blocking a URL in robots.txt and adding noindex at the same time is a classic mistake an SEO audit uncovers.

Also check that a Disallow: / rule left over from development has not made it to the live site. That single line can stop crawlers from accessing the entire website.

Robots.txt is also the place to reference your sitemap. How to build and submit one is covered in our guide to the XML sitemap and how to submit it to search engines. During an audit, simply confirm that the sitemap exists, lists only indexable URLs and that Search Console reads it without errors.

Step 2: Technical health

HTTPS

The whole site should run on HTTPS, and every HTTP address should permanently redirect to its HTTPS version. Google confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal back in 2014. Look for mixed content (images or scripts loaded over HTTP) and internal links that still point to old HTTP addresses.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google measures page experience with three Core Web Vitals. It considers LCP within 2.5 s, INP of 200 ms or less and CLS of 0.1 or less as good, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads. Field data is in Search Console; lab measurements come from PageSpeed Insights. For a detailed method, read our article on website speed and Core Web Vitals.

The mobile version

Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. If the mobile version hides content, links or structured data, Google does not see them. Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test in December 2023; check the mobile version in Lighthouse or on a phone.

Status codes and redirects

A crawler lists the status code of every URL. Watch for:

• 5xx errors – they make Google slow down crawling, and URLs that stay unavailable eventually drop out of the index.
• 404 and 410 – fine for pages that are truly gone. The problems are internal links to them and removed pages with backlinks but no redirect.
• Soft 404 – the page returns a 200 code but is empty or shows an error (a typical case is an empty online store category).
• Redirects – use 301 or 308 for permanent moves; a temporary 302 is a weaker signal for Google. Shorten redirect chains to a single hop.

Duplicates and canonical tags

The same content at several addresses (with and without www or a trailing slash, with filter parameters) dilutes your signals. Each page should carry a rel=canonical tag pointing to the preferred URL. For Google, canonical is a strong signal, not a command – if internal links, the sitemap or redirects contradict it, Google may pick a different canonical. URL Inspection in Search Console shows which one it chose.

Step 3: On-page elements

Check that your key pages have a unique title, a meta description and one clear H1 heading that matches the content. A crawler finds missing, duplicate and overly long values in minutes.

Google also generates title links automatically (sometimes from headings or anchor text) and uses the meta description only when it describes the page better than the content itself. How to write these elements is explained in our article on on-page vs off-page SEO.

Step 4: Content and keywords

A technically clean site will not help if its pages miss what customers search for. For every important URL, note which keywords it should target and which queries it actually appears for (the Performance report in Search Console).

Look for three typical problems:

• Cannibalization – two pages compete for the same queries and neither wins.
• Thin content – pages that do not answer the searcher’s question.
• Missing pages – important topics with no suitable target page on the site.

In our process, every keyword is assigned to exactly one target page, and a page’s copy targets only the keywords the analysis gave it. That prevents cannibalization at the planning stage. The full method, including a competitor review, is described in our guide to keyword research step by step.

Step 5: Internal links and backlinks

Internal links tell search engines which pages matter. A crawler reveals broken links, orphan pages with no internal links and important pages buried too deep in the structure.

Review backlinks in the Links report in Search Console: who links to you, to which pages, and whether any sources look suspicious. How to earn quality links over the long term is covered in our article on link building.

Step 6: Structured data

Structured data helps search engines understand what a page contains (a product, an article, a business, FAQs). Validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test and monitor it in the Search Console enhancement reports. Correct markup makes a page eligible for rich results but does not guarantee them. On WordPress we set it up in the Rank Math plugin; read more in why structured data is essential for your SEO.

SEO audit checklist: what to check, with what, and what to watch

What a free SEO checker can do – and where it stops

With an online SEO checker you enter a URL and get a score and a list of recommendations within seconds. Free versions usually check a single URL: title, meta description, headings, alt text, robots.txt, the sitemap and basic speed. Paid SEO audit tools add full-site crawling, repeated checks, rank tracking and backlink data.

An automated SEO test will not tell you what matters most:

• whether a page matches search intent and is better than the competition,
• which findings affect enquiries and which are cosmetic,
• cannibalization between pages and missing target pages,
• issues visible only in Search Console data (excluded pages, the canonical Google chose, real queries),
• the business context: which products and services take priority.

The score is also that tool’s own metric, not a Google rating: a site scoring 100 can have a serious indexing problem, and a site scoring 70 can sell well. If you are looking for an “SEO test by Google”, the closest thing is the SEO category in Lighthouse combined with Search Console data.

The output: a prioritized SEO report

A good SEO report does not end with 200 warnings. Each finding needs a description, the affected URLs, a proposed fix, an owner and a priority. Set the priority with a simple impact × effort matrix:

1. 1High impact, low effort – do it now (unblocking important pages in robots.txt, fixing redirects).
2. 2High impact, high effort – plan it as a project (speeding up the site, restructuring categories, new target pages).
3. 3Low impact, low effort – add it to routine maintenance.
4. 4Low impact, high effort – usually postpone.

Estimate impact by how important the affected pages are and how much traffic or how many enquiries flow through them. An error on a main category weighs more than the same error on an old blog post. After fixing, use Validate fix in Search Console.

How often to run an SEO audit

• Full SEO audit – we recommend once a year, and always before and after a redesign, a move to a new CMS or a domain change.
• Quick check – once a month, review indexing, performance and new errors in Search Console.
• Ad hoc audit – whenever traffic drops without an obvious reason.

Search Console sends email alerts about new issues, and the paid version of Screaming Frog can compare a new crawl with the previous one.

When to bring in a specialist

You can handle a basic SEO audit yourself. It pays to bring in a specialist when:

• traffic has dropped and you do not know why,
• you are planning a redesign or a site migration,
• the site has hundreds or thousands of URLs (an online store, filters, language versions),
• you have a list of errors but do not know what to fix first.

At WebOptim, an SEO audit is part of our SEO service: we start with the audit and keyword research and turn the findings into a prioritized plan. If you want to know what is holding your website back, tell us about your site and what you are trying to achieve.