SEO Audit Checklist: 20 Things to Check on Your Website

An SEO audit is a systematic review of your website to identify issues that are preventing it from ranking as well as it should. It covers technical health, on-page optimisation, content quality, and backlink profile. A thorough audit typically uncovers a mix of quick fixes — broken redirects, missing meta descriptions, slow pages — and longer-term strategic improvements.

The best time to run an SEO audit is before starting any new content strategy, after a site migration or redesign, or any time organic traffic drops unexpectedly. Many technical SEO issues accumulate gradually and are invisible without systematic checking — pages that return soft 404 errors, canonical tags pointing at wrong URLs, internal links to redirected pages. An audit surfaces these before they compound into larger ranking problems.

Start with crawlability and indexation. Verify Google can crawl your key pages by checking Search Console's Coverage report. Look for pages marked as 'Excluded' or 'Crawled — not indexed' that you expect to be indexed. Check your robots.txt file is not accidentally blocking important sections. Ensure your XML sitemap is up to date, submitted to Search Console, and contains no 404 URLs. Confirm canonical tags are correctly implemented — each page should either have a self-referencing canonical or point to the correct canonical version.

Page speed is a ranking factor and user experience issue simultaneously. Use Google's PageSpeed Insights to check your Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID). An LCP above 4 seconds is a significant problem on mobile. Check for HTTPS implementation across the entire site — any HTTP pages or mixed-content warnings undermine both security and trust signals. Verify structured data is valid using Google's Rich Results Test.

Audit title tags and meta descriptions across your key pages. Every page should have a unique title under 60 characters containing the primary keyword, and a unique meta description under 160 characters that accurately describes the page and includes a reason to click. Duplicate or missing title tags are among the most common and impactful issues to fix. Check H1 usage — each page should have exactly one H1 containing the primary keyword or a natural variation of it.

Review your content for thin pages — pages with fewer than 300 words that don't serve a clear purpose. Google can penalise sites with a high proportion of thin content, and consolidating or improving these pages often produces measurable ranking improvements. Check for keyword cannibalisation: if two or more pages on your site target the same primary keyword, they compete against each other and dilute your ranking potential. Merge, redirect, or differentiate cannibalising pages.

Review your backlink profile for toxic or spammy links — low-quality directory spam, link farm entries, or irrelevant foreign-language sites linking to you can drag rankings down. Use Google's Disavow Tool if you find links that appear manipulative and can't be removed manually. Compare your backlink count and domain authority against your top three competitors: if they have significantly more high-quality backlinks, closing that gap is one of your highest-priority long-term activities.

Check competitor traffic trends using a tool like Traffic Finder. If a competitor has grown organic traffic significantly in the last 6 months, examine which pages are driving that growth — they've found something worth studying. Finally, set up ongoing monitoring: Google Search Console for crawl errors and query performance, a rank tracker for your top 20 keywords, and a monthly competitive traffic check to spot opportunities and threats before they become urgent.