SEO Audit Checklist: 24 Things to Check on Your Website

An SEO audit is a health check for your website. It shows what is stopping Google from finding, understanding and ranking your pages. You can run a basic audit yourself using free tools such as Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. Work through this checklist in order.

Crawling and indexing

1. Is your site in Google? Search site:yourdomain.com to see which pages are indexed.
2. Check robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure it does not block important pages.
3. Check for noindex tags. In WordPress, make sure “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is off under Settings, Reading.
4. Submit an XML sitemap in Search Console and fix any errors it reports.
5. Review the Pages report in Search Console for pages that are excluded or have errors.

Technical health

6. Use HTTPS everywhere, and redirect HTTP to HTTPS.
7. Choose one version of your domain (with or without www) and redirect the other.
8. Fix broken links and 404 errors, and make sure no pages return server errors.
9. Check redirects. Avoid long chains of redirects.
10. Use canonical tags so duplicate versions of a page point to the main one.

Speed and mobile

11. Run PageSpeed Insights and look at Core Web Vitals: loading (LCP), interactivity (INP) and layout stability (CLS).
12. Test on a real phone. Check text size, buttons and menus.
13. Compress and resize images, and lazy-load images below the fold.

On-page SEO

14. Give every page a unique title that includes its main topic and is roughly 50 to 60 characters.
15. Write a meta description for every page that explains what the page offers, in around 150 characters.
16. Use one H1 per page, with H2 and H3 headings in a logical order.
17. Add descriptive alt text to meaningful images.
18. Link related pages together with clear anchor text.

Content

19. Remove or improve thin pages that say very little.
20. Delete default and placeholder content such as sample pages and test posts.
21. Match each page to a search intent. Decide what a visitor expects to find and make sure the page delivers it.
22. Add expert signals: author names, business details, reviews and real examples.

Structured data and local

23. Add schema markup for your organisation, services, articles and FAQs where relevant.
24. Complete your Google Business Profile if you serve local customers.

Turn the audit into an action plan

Once you have your list, sort issues by impact: fix anything that blocks indexing first, then speed and mobile problems, then on-page and content improvements. If you would rather have a specialist do this for you, our SEO service starts with a full audit and a prioritised action plan. Contact us to get started.