SEO audit

What does an SEO audit cover?

Most audits look at four areas:

• Technical: Can search engines reach and render all important pages? Typical checks include status codes, redirects, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, canonical tags, page speed, and JavaScript.
• On-page: title tags, headings, internal links, and duplicate content.
• Content: whether pages answer the queries they are supposed to rank for.
• Off-page: the backlink profile.

Google lists “review of your site content or structure” and technical advice on topics such as redirects, error pages, and JavaScript among the services an SEO can offer. Google also advises site owners who hire someone for an audit to grant only read access to Search Console at that stage.

How does an audit usually work?

An audit typically starts with a crawl of the full site. A crawler requests every reachable URL and records status codes, metadata, and links. Data from Google Search Console adds the search engine’s view, such as indexing status and queries. Combining both sources turns raw data into findings, for example thousands of product pages with noindex or redirect chains in the main navigation.

Prioritization is the step that makes an audit useful. An error on ten pages without traffic matters less than a wrong canonical on every category page.

Example

After a template update, an online store sees fewer organic clicks on category pages. The audit finds that 1,200 paginated category pages point their canonical to page 1, that internal search creates crawlable URLs without unique content, and that the XML sitemap lists redirected URLs. The canonicals go first because they affect many pages with traffic.

Checklist

• The Page indexing report in Search Console shows the important pages as indexed and gives an understandable reason for each excluded page.
• robots.txt does not block pages that should appear in search, or CSS and JavaScript files Google needs to understand the page.
• Important pages return status 200, and redirects point straight to the final destination without chains.
• Canonical annotations point to the URL that should appear in search, and that URL is indexable.
• The XML sitemap lists only canonical URLs.
• Every page has its own descriptive <title> element.
• Internal links are <a> elements with an href attribute so Google can follow them.
• The URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows important content and links in the rendered HTML.
• Findings are prioritized by the number of affected pages and their traffic (practical experience).

FAQ

What is the difference between an SEO audit and an SEO checker? In common usage, free SEO checkers run automated tests on a single URL or a sample. An audit covers the whole site and evaluates and prioritizes the findings.

How often should you run an SEO audit? There is no fixed rule. Common occasions are before and after a relaunch, after major template changes, and when rankings drop without an obvious reason. Audits are snapshots, so continuous monitoring catches changes between them.

Last updated: October 8, 2026