Ultimate SEO Audit Checklist

TL;DR: The Ultimate SEO Audit Guide for Better Website Rankings

1. An SEO Audit is Your Website’s Health Check – It identifies what’s working, what’s not, and what needs improvement across technical, on-page, off-page, content, and local SEO areas to boost search visibility.

2. Use a Full-Spectrum Checklist – Cover everything from keyword usage, site architecture, mobile-friendliness, and backlink health to Google indexing and crawlability to avoid ranking issues and missed traffic.

3. Break It Down by Focus Area – Conduct audits in manageable segments (e.g., technical, content, local SEO) to suit your website size, goals, or budget, and prioritise high-impact pages first.

4. Don’t Forget Pre-Launch Audits – Even before going live, a technical audit can ensure your site is optimised from day one—use pre-launch SEO checklists to prevent issues post-launch.

5. Expert Help Makes a Difference – SEO audits are complex, and working with professionals or using advanced tools (like Click Intelligence’s free SEO audit tool) ensures nothing gets missed and your SEO strategy stays competitive.

Businesses are told that to be successful, they need to create a website, as this is where they can find more customers and widen their brand awareness. Not to mention, it also increases trust levels and authority. However, with so many websites, search engines had to devise a way to show the relevant web pages and content to the users based on their searches. The more ranking factors a website can meet, the better it may perform in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

If you have noticed that your website isn’t performing to the standard you need and that your search rankings are much lower than anticipated, SEO is the investment you need to make. It brings increased rankings and visibility on the SERPs, more traffic, a boost in trust, better user experience, and brand awareness. To reach this point, you will have to spend a decent percentage of your time optimising your entire website, and the best place to start with this optimisation is with an SEO audit.

An SEO audit is fantastic so long as you do it right. We recommend following an SEO audit checklist to tick off every box and remain confident that you haven’t missed a single aspect. The smallest error on your website could affect your performance, so a thorough job is imperative.

This audit checklist will take you through every audit stage and offer tips for setting up one yourself. As a bonus, learn more about the following:

• What Is An SEO Audit?
• What Is Technical SEO?
• What Is An SEO Audit Report?

What Is An SEO Audit?

An SEO audit evaluates how optimised your website is for the search engines like Google and Bing. Many consider this to be an SEO health check of your website because, alongside identifying what is working for you, it will also tell you if any errors could be impacting your search rankings. An SEO audit aims to help improve your website’s performance by highlighting to you what you need to remove and what you need to update. Plus, it can be a great way to learn how to smash the competition out of the water.

What Does A Website SEO Audit Cover?

Website audits don’t necessarily have to follow the same process, but the SEO audits that cover the following do offer the most peace of mind that you haven’t missed anything:

• Keyword Research
• On Page SEO
• User experience
• Site architecture
• Competitor benchmarking
• Backlink Profile
• Page Experience
• Indexing
• Crawlability
• Manual Actions
• Mobile-Friendliness

As you can see, this is quite large. If you have a much bigger website than most or need to do your audits around your monthly budgets, it is possible to break down the audits into smaller, more manageable chunks. For instance, you can have a:

• Content SEO Audit
• On Page SEO Audit
• Off Page SEO Audit
• Technical SEO Audit
• Local SEO Audit

If you turn to us for SEO Auditing Services, we can complete the audit in a way that works for you.

How To Do A Website Audit: Our Quick Fire Checklist

You can outsource an SEO site audit to an agency like ours, but if you are set on doing it yourself or want to learn more about the process it takes, our audit checklist is what you need to learn, and you can do so in under 15 minutes. Need to learn much faster than this? Check out our guide on How To Perform An SEO Audit In 8 Steps!

To help make this easier to digest, we’ve broken it down into 5 categories, as mentioned previously.

1. SEO Content Audit

Your content needs to be assessed, from your blogs to your images and how it is organised. It will determine if what you have on your current site is working in your favour and see how you could improve your content strategy and development if the content is declining.

Focus On Content Based On Your Goals

Setting goals is vital for the success of this audit. What do you want your content to achieve for you?

Do you want to improve your SEO results or your conversion rate? Perhaps you want to increase audience engagement. If you want to improve your SEO results, determine which pages have the best chance to rank high (ones that are ranking well already are usually the best bet), and understand what sections need to be removed or updated and rewritten to include keywords, for instance. In comparison, if your goal were to increase engagement, you would focus on more engaging content and optimise this first. Take the same approach of assessing each piece to see where you can improve it.

Assess The Content

Check whether you have the right length of written content. It may be too short compared to the other blogs you are competing with on the SERPs. This will, of course, depend on your industry and the content you produce. An evergreen, in-depth blog may not work for your brand. Content SEO audits check whether you would benefit from shorter introductions, smaller paragraphs, more subheaders optimised with keywords, and images and videos within the blog.

Check Old Content

Always check how your content is doing 6 months after posting it to see how many clicks you have gained or lost. Regularly checking and refreshing content will help your rankings, as you have highly relevant content for your users.

Uncover Gaps

A content audit can also uncover whether there are gaps. You may have missed an opportunity for content with certain keywords, affecting your long-tail keywords rankings.

2. On Page SEO Audit

Optimising every page will take time, so you must prioritise certain pages over others and slowly work through your list.

You may class some pages as more important because of the keyword you want to target, that gets more traffic, or already ranks pretty well but still has room for improvement. These pages will be fully assessed for keywords, internal links, external links, and where you place these keywords.

For this type of SEO auditing, it is best to further break it down:

Keyword Research

Keyword research will uncover the best keywords that will help you rank better. With an audit, SEO experts discover if you are missing any opportunities with your keywords by looking at what your competitor is already using. Using a Keyword Research tool, specifically one looking for gaps, it is possible to compare the missing keywords competitors currently rank for and the ones they rank for higher than you.

Check Organic Traffic

Any site audit SEO expert will tell you the importance of checking your organic traffic during an audit. Learning if drops in organic traffic occur because of Google updates enables you to better prepare for the next time Google informs us of an algorithm change. Often these updates revolve around link spam and content quality, so you should start working on these 2 aspects, but gaining some data about your traffic can help discover other issues quickly.

On Page Factors

In terms of content, you will want to look for issues in your titles, H1 headings, meta descriptions, and images and see where you can optimise these. You may find that you are missing some title tags or meta descriptions.

Note: You can also assess some more technical aspects, including duplicate pages, page crawling and indexing issues, and not found errors. As these come under Technical SEO, you may prefer to check these when doing a website technical audit. Our technical SEO checklist details all of this below.

User Experience

How good is your website in terms of user experience, and could it be better? This step uncovers it for you.

• Page Speed

Running an SEO page audit on speed is vital. As a ranking factor for Google, getting this right could push your rankings. The slower your web page is to load, the higher the chance visitors will leave before it loads. The quicker it loads, the more likely your visitors will stay on your website. You want to be aiming for your website pages to be loading within 1-3 seconds. Run a speed test on the desktop and mobile versions of your website.

• Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals enables Google to measure user experience better. If you want to improve the user experience, you need to learn how your website performs according to the Core Web Vitals. You can check this in Google Search Console, or by using our Core Web Vitals Checker.

Internal Links

Not only do internal links help search engines crawl your website, but they also assist your visitors and help direct link authority to the most important pages. When you run an analysis on your internal links, you will be presented with a report that lists all the errors you are facing, such as broken links. Depending on the tool you use, you should also have an explanation about how to fix these.

A Word About Manual Actions

Your SEO website audit must keep on the right side of Google to avoid penalties and dropping down rankings. If you have optimised your content incorrectly in the past, such as using keyword stuffing techniques, unnatural links, or very thin content, you may have harmed your SEO rankings. While doing your SEO page audit, it is worth checking on Google Search Console that you haven’t received a penalty from them. If you see a tick that says No Issues Detected, you won’t have been hit with one. However, if you do see a Manual Action, you must react to this as soon as possible. We can help you with this matter if required.

3. Off Page SEO Audit

You are running a website SEO audit, but that shouldn’t mean you don’t look beyond this. A lot of factors outside of your website will influence rankings. Learn how to do a website audit off page with this checklist.

Backlink Profile

Your backlink profile can influence your rankings for good and bad. A healthy backlink profile can boost your rankings, domain authority, and trust, while a poor one can send you down the SERPs. Your SEO audits allow you to learn from past mistakes and fix them so that you don’t have to suffer anymore, including your backlink profile assessment. If you have low-quality backlinks, learn where they are and ask Google to disavow them. Then, find if there are other, better backlink opportunities. You can find a lot from competitors and uncover websites willing to link to websites like yours.

Competitor benchmarking

Focusing on only your website will help you but what takes your audit to the next level is benchmarking against your competitors. You will need to look at metrics like authority score, organic traffic, organic keywords, and referring domains. Gaining more insight into your competitors’ performance gives you a realistic and measurable goal (benchmark) to reach. For those seeking Enterprise SEO services and competing in a tough crowd, competitive benchmarking helps you map out the journey to success, even if that road is long.

4. Technical SEO Audits

Before we dive into the technical audit, which, as you would expect from the name, focuses on the technical aspects of your website, it is first important to learn just what technical SEO is.

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO helps improve your search engine rankings by focusing on tasks that help make your website easier to crawl. The specifics that you will be checking and then updating or maintaining are:

• Site load time
• Checking Redirects
• Checking robot.txt files
• User-friendly website
• Checking broken links
• Checking for lost pages

You must have an accurate and user-friendly website that visitors can easily access. If yours is slow and unresponsive, doesn’t provide a secure connection, and does not give the visitor what is expected, you can’t expect your website to rank as well.

You cannot dispute the technical SEO importance. If you have spent time researching, creating, and spreading the word about your awesome content but have not considered the time it takes for your page to load, all that hard work may be for nothing. Not only are you losing traffic, but you are taking a knock on your reputation and trust.

As part of your technical SEO audit, you will need to look into the following.

Indexing

• Missing Pages

You need to check whether Google has indexed your pages. Anything that hasn’t simply won’t rank. This is easy to check with Google Search Console. On the Pages report, you will find a graph of the pages with their indexing status. Here you will learn more about why they haven’t been indexed. It is natural to have some pages here, such as admin pages, but if you discover vital pages are not indexed, you need to request indexing or fix it following Google Guidelines.

• Duplicates

While checking your indexing, confirm that Google is only indexing one version of your site. If you run your website with more than one URL, crawling and indexing issues can affect rankings. Google will see any variations as duplicates.

Crawlability

Google crawls web pages, so you need to do the same to ensure it won’t miss anything the next time it crawls your site. You can make the most of free SEO tools to help with this once you’ve finished reviewing our technical SEO audit checklist. If you choose to come to an agency like us to run a site crawl audit, our site audit SEO experts have access to the best tools available and can easily assess your website.

Everything our SEO Team finds will be presented to you in an SEO audit report. What is an SEO audit report? An SEO report presents your errors, warnings, and notices, as well as Thematic Reports. Some issues you may have include:

• Internal Links
• On Page SEO
• Performance
• Markup
• Redirect
• Sitemap

Mobile-First Index

You need to check that your mobile site is functioning well, if not better, than your desktop website. Many of your customers will be using mobiles to access your website, so the less well your site performs, the more traffic you will lose. Don’t leave this part of the technical site audit to the last minute. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it will tell Google that user experience isn’t your priority, and as one of the Page Experience signals, this can’t be good for your rankings. It is easy to check on Google Search Console, informing you of what is usable and what is not and what exactly needs improvement, from the text’s size to content being too wide. The sooner you do this SEO audit online, the quicker you can get to fixing your mobile site. It may require a lot of work, so prioritise this.

Broken Pages

Discover whether you have broken URLs with tools like Afrefs Site Explorer and filter the 404 not found URLs from high to low. You don’t want broken pages to affect your rankings and Google’s ability to crawl your website properly. You may also see 301/302 redirects when running a site audit. Learn where these are, fix the issue, and regularly check back.

5. Local SEO Audit

If you have a small business, a local eCommerce SEO audit might be better for you. Local SEO audits focus on building relevance, awareness, and authority within a certain geographical location. Your local SEO checklist should cover the following:

• Local Keyword Research
• Local Content
• Assessment Of Local Business Listings
• Backlinks
• Competitor analysis
• Google My Business (GMB)
• Google Penalties
• Rankings
• Reviews And Ratings

You will follow the same steps for a regular SEO audit but solely focus on the local element.

Audit SEO Website Crossovers

With these website audits, you will find there is some crossover. You could have already crossed off many elements in the On Page Audit by the time you get to the Technical SEO Audit. The main thing is that you tick off every area on this website audit checklist.

How To Do An SEO Audit Of Your Website If You Haven’t Launched It Yet

The above is great if you have already launched your website, but what happens if you haven’t made the final push and are still waiting for it to go live? You don’t have to wait until your site is live to do an SEO audit.

There are actions you can take before launching and a technical SEO checklist you can easily follow. Our SEO checklist: pre and post launch tips will help you understand the steps you can take before you make your website live.

How We Can Help

SEO and audits, especially technical SEO audits, can be difficult to get the hang of if you are a beginner. You can still miss things even if you are familiar with this line of work! This is why it can be beneficial to outsource this work to an agency that can either take on all the work or provide you with a fresh pair of eyes that confirms everything has been spotted.

Beyond our SEO audit services, we have developed a free SEO audit tool, which you use to learn more about your articles or landing pages and how well-optimised they are. Plus, if you feel like you need to enhance your knowledge of everything SEO, we can help in this regard too. Our SEO Knowledge Hub is packed full of helpful guides, checklists, and advice to guarantee your SEO game is strong.