How to do an SEO audit: the order, the checks and the fix list

To do an SEO audit, work from the bottom of the stack up. Record a baseline from Search Console, confirm Google can crawl and index the pages that matter, review page-level SEO on each template, check speed and structured data, then sort every finding into a fix list ranked by traffic at stake and effort. A perfect title on a page Google cannot index is wasted work, so the order matters.

This post covers the process. The items to tick off live in the technical SEO checklist and the on-page SEO checklist. Keep both open as you go.

How to do an SEO audit in five steps

An SEO audit has five steps, and each one depends on the one before it.

On a site with a handful of templates, one person can finish it in a day.

Record a baseline before you change anything

Export what the site does now. Without a baseline you cannot tell whether the audit helped.

From Search Console, export the Performance report by page for the last 16 months and the Page indexing report with its reasons for pages not indexed.

Then pick the pages you will audit closely. Take your top 10 pages by clicks, plus every page that makes money (pricing, product, signup) even if it gets little traffic. Group them by template, because fixing a template fixes every page built on it.

Audit crawling and indexing before content

Crawling and indexing come first because every later step assumes Google has the page. Check them in this order.

1. Fetch /robots.txt and make sure no rule blocks a page or folder you want ranked.
2. Request each sampled URL and confirm it returns 200 directly, with no redirect chain. Our guide to redirect chains covers the fixes.
3. View the source and look for a stray noindex and for a canonical tag that points somewhere else.
4. Compare your sitemap with the pages that actually exist. Sitemaps full of redirects and 404s are common after a migration.
5. Read the "not indexed" reasons in Search Console for your sampled pages.

If this step turns up a blocked folder or a sitewide noindex, stop and fix it first. When the whole site is missing from Google, why your website is not showing up on Google is a faster diagnosis than a full audit.

Audit page-level SEO on your templates

Once Google can index the pages, check that each template says clearly what its page is about.

Look at the title, the meta description, the H1 and the first paragraph together. They should agree on one topic, and that topic should match a query people actually search. Two pages targeting the same query is a finding.

Then check what holds good pages back. Run your top templates through Core Web Vitals and note which metric fails, since an LCP problem and a layout shift problem have different owners. Validate the structured data on each template. Count internal links to your money pages, since a page with two links pointing at it looks unimportant.

If you are unsure whether a finding matters, look for it in Google's SEO starter guide.

How to prioritize the SEO audit fix list

Score every finding on two things, how much traffic or revenue it touches and how much work it takes, then fix in this order.

1. Anything that stops indexing on pages that earn money. Fix this week.
2. Template-level problems. One change to a product template can fix 2,000 titles at once.
3. Issues on your top 10 pages by clicks, where small gains are worth the most.
4. Everything else, batched by whoever owns it: developers, writers or whoever runs the CMS.

Write each finding as a task with the URL, what is wrong, the fix and an owner. "Improve titles" is not a task. "Product template title repeats the brand twice, drop the second one" is. Set a date to recheck, usually two to four weeks after the fix ships, and compare against your baseline. A sample SEO audit report template shows one way to lay this out.

Skip the low-priority warnings until the rest ships. A missing alt attribute on a decorative icon will not move rankings.

Run the audit checks on your own site

Our website check runs steps 2 to 4 on up to three pages you pick. By default it checks crawling and indexing, on-page SEO, structured data and content, and you can add images, rendering and mobile, Core Web Vitals, and a separate crawl of up to 150 pages for internal links and sitemap coverage. It returns one fix list sorted into high, medium and low priority, with 0 to 100 scores. Run it again after you publish and it reports the percent of issues fixed and any new ones.

It does not read Search Console or check rankings and backlinks, so the baseline in step 1 is still yours to pull. The default checks cost 67 credits for one page plus 47 for each extra page, and the price shows before you run it. A quick check of your home page needs no account, costs no credits and takes about 20 seconds.