SEO Audit Checklist: 32 Checks and How Often to Run Them

An SEO audit is a check of everything that decides whether search engines can find, understand and rank your pages, and whether the visits turn into customers. This checklist has 32 checks in eight groups, in the order we run them, with the free tools that cover each one.

First, the question most people ask before they start.

How Often Should You Do an SEO Audit?

Audit in three rhythms: a light check every month, a review every quarter and a full audit once a year. Google itself suggests checking Search Console around once every month, or when you change the site's content, and it emails you when it finds new issues.

The event audit matters most. Redesigns and platform migrations are where sites lose rankings they spent years building, usually through missing redirects or pages accidentally set to noindex.

The Tools You Need

Most of this checklist can be done with free tools:

• Google Search Console for indexing, search performance and Core Web Vitals from real visitors.
• Google Analytics 4 for traffic, landing pages and conversions.
• A site crawler such as Screaming Frog, which crawls up to 500 URLs free and costs €245 a year beyond that.
• PageSpeed Insights for speed on individual pages.

1. Crawling and Indexing

If Google cannot crawl and index a page, nothing else in this list matters for it. Start here.

1. robots.txt does not block important pages. Check that product, service and blog folders are allowed, and that CSS and JavaScript files are not blocked.
2. The XML sitemap is clean and submitted. It should list only pages you want indexed (no redirects, no 404s, no noindexed pages) and be submitted in Search Console.
3. Important pages are indexed. In Search Console's Pages report, read the reasons listed under "Not indexed" and look for key pages among them.
4. No stray noindex tags. A noindex left over from a staging site is one of the most common causes of sudden traffic loss.
5. Canonical tags point to the right URL. Each page should point to itself unless it is a genuine duplicate.
6. One version of the site. http and https, www and non-www should all redirect to a single version in one step.
7. No redirect chains or loops. Each old URL should go straight to its final destination.
8. Broken pages are fixed or redirected. Find 404s and "soft 404s" (empty pages that return a normal status) and either restore them or redirect them to the closest match.

2. Page Experience and Speed

9. Core Web Vitals pass for real visitors. A page is good when, for 75% of visits, Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint is 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift is 0.1 or less. Search Console's Core Web Vitals report shows this per group of pages.
10. The site works on a phone. Text is readable without zooming, buttons are easy to tap, and nothing is wider than the screen.
11. HTTPS everywhere. Every page loads over https, with no images or scripts still loading over http.
12. No pop-ups that cover the content. Especially on mobile, a pop-up that blocks the page on arrival frustrates visitors and can hurt how Google rates the page.

3. On-page Basics

13. Every page has a unique, descriptive title tag. Put the main topic near the start and keep it short enough to show in full.
14. Meta descriptions are unique and written for the click. Google often rewrites them, but a good one still earns clicks when it is shown.
15. One H1 per page that says what the page is about, with H2s that follow the questions a reader has.
16. Key pages get internal links. Your most important service or product pages should be linked from the menu and from related pages. Look for "orphan" pages that nothing links to.
17. Images have alt text and a sensible file size. Describe what the image shows, and compress large photos.
18. No thin or near-duplicate pages. Pages with a few lines of text, or many pages that differ only by a city name, should be merged, improved or removed.

4. Content and Search Intent

19. Each page targets one search intent. If two of your pages compete for the same search, Google often shows neither well. Merge them or give each a clear, different purpose.
20. Pages on page two get attention first. In Search Console, filter for queries where your average position is between 11 and 20. These pages are close to page one and usually need better content, internal links or a sharper title rather than a rebuild.
21. Pages losing traffic are refreshed. Compare the last three months with the same period a year earlier and update pages whose clicks have fallen.
22. Readers can see who is behind the content. Author or reviewer names, business details, dates and sources help both readers and search engines trust a page.

5. Structured Data

23. Structured data is valid. Test key templates with Google's Rich Results Test and fix errors.
24. It matches what the page shows. Reviews, prices and FAQs in the markup must be visible on the page. Markup that does not match is ignored at best.

6. Links

25. No broken internal or outbound links. Your crawler lists them; fix or remove them.
26. The backlink profile is growing, not shrinking. Check new and lost links to your site in a backlink tool, and note which lost links were worth recovering. Google says most sites will not need to use the disavow tool, so do not spend audit time on it unless you have a manual action.

7. Local and AI Search

27. Your Google Business Profile is complete and matches the site. Name, address, phone number, hours and categories should be the same everywhere. Our guide to improving local SEO rankings covers this in depth.
28. AI search crawlers can read the site. Check robots.txt for rules that block crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search) or PerplexityBot if you want to appear in their answers. Blocking Google-Extended does not affect Google Search.
29. Key pages answer questions directly. The first two sentences under each heading should answer that heading's question, which makes the page easier for Google's AI Overviews and other engines to quote. See how to show up in Google AI Overviews.

8. Tracking and Conversions

An audit that only looks at rankings misses the point. These checks tell you whether search visitors become customers.

30. Calls, forms and bookings are tracked as key events in Google Analytics 4, and the numbers match what actually arrives.
31. Search Console is verified for the whole domain and linked to Google Analytics, so you can see which searches lead to which pages.
32. The paths to contact you work. Submit every form, tap every phone number on a phone, and check that confirmation emails arrive.

How to Prioritize What You Find

A full audit usually finds dozens of issues. Most do not matter much. Sort them by two questions: how much will fixing this change leads, and how much effort does it take?

Fix the top five before you start anything new. An audit that sits in a folder is worth nothing.

When to Get Help

If you run this checklist yourself, you will find most of what matters. Where experience helps is in the judgment: which of the 200 warnings a crawler reports are costing you customers, and what order to fix them in.

Our SEO audit is the full version of this list for one site: a Screaming Frog crawl, a Search Console and GA4 review, and a fix list ranked by impact, delivered in 7 working days with a recorded walkthrough.