What Does an SEO Audit Include? A Complete Checklist

A proper SEO audit checks everything that affects how your website performs in search: technical health, on-page optimisation, content quality, backlinks, local signals, visibility in AI search and whether your tracking works. The best audits end with a prioritised action plan that tells you what to fix first, why it matters and roughly how much effort it will take. A list of problems on its own is not an audit; it is a to-do list with no order.

I have audited many websites over the past 13 years, from small local businesses to large online shops. This guide sets out what a thorough audit should cover, what you should receive at the end and how to spot an audit that will not help you.

Why an SEO audit matters

An audit is the foundation for any serious SEO work. Without one, you are guessing. You might spend months writing new content when the real problem is that Google cannot index half your pages, or chase links when your service pages do not match what customers search for.

A good audit answers four questions:

• What is stopping your site from ranking better right now?
• Where are the quickest wins?
• Where are the biggest long-term opportunities?
• What should you do first, second and third?

It also gives you a baseline, so you can measure progress against where you started.

1. Technical SEO checks

Technical SEO is about whether search engines can find, crawl, render and index your pages. If this is broken, nothing else works properly. A thorough technical review covers:

• Indexing. Which pages are indexed in Google, which are excluded and why. Search Console’s page indexing report is the starting point.
• Crawlability. Robots.txt rules, noindex tags, blocked resources and orphan pages that nothing links to.
• Site structure. How pages are organised and how many clicks it takes to reach important ones.
• Redirects and errors. Broken links, 404 pages that should redirect, redirect chains and loops.
• Canonical tags and duplicate content. Whether duplicate or near-duplicate pages point search engines to the right version.
• XML sitemaps. Whether they exist, are submitted and contain only pages you want indexed.
• Page speed and Core Web Vitals. Loading, responsiveness and visual stability on mobile and desktop. Our guide to Core Web Vitals explains each metric.
• Mobile usability. Whether pages work properly on phones, where most searches happen.
• HTTPS and security. Secure pages throughout, with no mixed content warnings.
• JavaScript rendering. Whether important content is visible to search engines without relying on scripts.

For a deeper checklist, see our technical SEO checklist.

2. On-page SEO checks

On-page checks look at how well each important page targets the searches it should rank for. This includes:

• Title tags and meta descriptions: length, uniqueness, relevance and whether they give people a reason to click.
• Headings: one clear H1 per page and a logical heading structure.
• Keyword targeting: whether each important page targets a clear topic, and whether several pages compete for the same searches.
• Internal links: whether important pages receive enough links from relevant pages, with descriptive anchor text.
• Images: file sizes, alt text and descriptive file names.
• Structured data: whether schema markup is present, valid and matches the visible content.
• URLs: short, readable and consistent.

3. Content checks

Content is where many sites fall short. A content review asks whether your pages actually deserve to rank. It looks at:

• Coverage. Do you have pages for each service, product category and important question your customers ask?
• Quality and depth. Do pages answer the searcher’s question better than competing pages?
• Thin and duplicate content. Pages with very little useful content, or location pages that only change the town name.
• Experience and expertise. Named authors, real examples and evidence of first-hand knowledge, which support the trust signals described in our guide to E-E-A-T.
• Freshness. Out-of-date information, old prices and pages that need refreshing.
• Cannibalisation. Several pages or posts competing for the same search, which weakens all of them.
• Conversion. Whether pages make it clear what to do next.

4. Backlink and authority checks

Links from other websites remain an important signal of authority. A backlink review covers:

• How many websites link to you and how relevant and trustworthy they are.
• Which of your pages attract links, and which important pages have none.
• How your link profile compares with the competitors who outrank you.
• Any signs of low-quality, paid or manipulative links that could be a risk.
• Broken backlinks pointing to pages that no longer exist, which can be recovered with redirects.
• Unlinked brand mentions that could be turned into links.

Disavowing links is rarely needed for most small businesses. A good auditor will only recommend it where there is clear evidence of a problem.

5. Local SEO checks

If you serve customers in a particular area, the audit should include local search. That means reviewing:

• Your Google Business Profile: categories, services, hours, photos, posts and how you reply to reviews.
• Review volume, rating and recency compared with local competitors.
• Consistency of your business name, address and phone number across directories. See our guide to local citations in the UK.
• Location and service area pages, and whether they are genuinely useful.
• LocalBusiness structured data.
• Rankings in the map results across the areas you serve.

6. AI search visibility checks

A modern audit should also look at how your business appears in AI-generated answers, such as Google’s AI Overviews and assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. This includes:

• Whether AI tools mention or recommend your business for relevant questions, and how they describe you.
• Whether your key pages answer common questions clearly and directly.
• Whether your robots.txt blocks search or AI crawlers you actually want to allow.
• How consistent your business information is across the web, which affects how confidently AI tools describe you.

Our guide to measuring AI search visibility explains how to track this over time.

7. Competitor analysis

Your rankings only make sense compared with the sites you compete against. A competitor review looks at who ranks above you for your most important searches, what their pages cover that yours do not, how their authority compares and where they are weak. It often reveals the clearest opportunities. Our guide to running a competitor analysis shows the process.

8. Analytics and tracking checks

An audit should confirm that you can measure results. That means checking that Google Analytics and Search Console are set up correctly, that key actions such as form submissions, calls and purchases are tracked as conversions, and that you can see which pages and channels bring enquiries. Many audits uncover broken or missing tracking, which makes every other decision harder.

What you should receive at the end

The report is where many audits fail. A good audit delivers:

1. A short summary of the main findings in plain English, readable in ten minutes.
2. A prioritised action plan, ranking each recommendation by likely impact and effort.
3. Clear explanations of why each issue matters and how to fix it, with specific pages and examples.
4. Quick wins you can action straight away.
5. A baseline of current rankings, traffic, indexing and conversions to measure progress against.
6. A walkthrough call so you can ask questions and agree next steps.

A 100-page export from an SEO tool, with every warning listed at the same level of urgency, is not useful. Many automated warnings do not matter at all for your business.

Automated reports vs a manual audit

SEO tools are excellent at finding technical issues across many pages quickly, and any good auditor uses them. But tools cannot judge which issues matter for your business, whether your content is better than a competitor’s, or whether a page targets the right search intent. They also flag issues that are harmless, which can send you chasing problems that do not exist.

The value of a manual audit is judgement: separating the handful of issues that are holding you back from the long tail of warnings that are not.

The problems audits find most often

Every site is different, but the same issues come up again and again in the audits we run for small and medium businesses:

• Important pages not indexed, often because of a leftover noindex tag, a robots.txt rule from development or a canonical tag pointing elsewhere.
• One page trying to rank for everything, usually a services page that lists every service in a paragraph each.
• Missing or duplicated title tags, often the business name alone or the same title across dozens of pages.
• Thin location pages created by copying one page and swapping the town name.
• Lost rankings from an old redesign, where URLs changed without redirects.
• Slow mobile pages caused by oversized images, heavy themes or too many plugins and scripts.
• Weak internal linking, so blog posts never pass visitors or authority to service pages.
• Incomplete Google Business Profile with the wrong primary category, missing services or no recent photos.
• Broken conversion tracking, so nobody knows which pages bring enquiries.

Most of these are relatively quick to fix once identified, which is why an audit often pays for itself within the first few months.

How to prepare for an audit

You will get more from an audit if you prepare a few things in advance:

• Access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, added as a user rather than shared passwords.
• Access to your Google Business Profile if you serve a local area.
• A list of your most important services, products and locations.
• Your main competitors, as you see them.
• Any history that matters: redesigns, migrations, previous agencies, sudden traffic drops.
• Your goals for the next 12 months.

How much does an SEO audit cost?

In the UK, audit prices depend on the size and complexity of the site and how deep the review goes. Small business sites commonly cost from a few hundred pounds up to around £1,500. Larger sites, online shops and sites with complex technical set-ups often cost several thousand pounds. Our guide to SEO pricing in the UK covers typical ranges and what affects them.

When to get an SEO audit

• Before starting any new SEO campaign or hiring a new agency.
• Before and after a website redesign or migration.
• After an unexplained drop in traffic or rankings.
• Once a year as a health check.
• When you expand into new services or locations.

Getting an audit that leads to results

An audit is only as useful as the action it leads to. Choose an auditor who explains findings in plain English, prioritises ruthlessly and is happy to talk through the plan. Then act on the top recommendations quickly, because the first fixes often bring the fastest gains.

Our digital marketing audit covers every area in this guide and ends with a prioritised plan and a walkthrough call. It is also how our SEO services begin.

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