SEO audit
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a structured review of a website to find issues and opportunities affecting its search performance. A full audit covers technical SEO (crawling, indexing, speed, redirects), on-page SEO (titles, content, headings), content quality and gaps, and the backlink profile. The output is a prioritised list of fixes.
Most audits start with a crawl of the whole site and data from Google Search Console. The crawl finds issues like broken links, missing titles, duplicate content and redirect chains; Search Console shows what Google actually indexes and which queries bring clicks. A content audit and backlink review add the content and authority side.
Why SEO audit matters for SEO
An audit shows where effort will pay off. Many sites have a few issues, an indexing block or a slow template, that matter far more than everything else.
Regular audits catch problems introduced by redesigns, plugins or deploys before they cost traffic.
How to do an SEO audit
- Crawl the site and list errors: 4xx and 5xx pages, redirects, missing or duplicate titles, noindex pages and orphan pages.
- Compare the crawl with Search Console’s Page indexing report.
- Check Core Web Vitals and mobile usability for key templates.
- Review on-page elements on your most important pages.
- Find pages that lost traffic and content gaps against competitors.
- Review backlinks and lost links.
- Rank fixes by impact and effort, and start with what affects the most valuable pages.
SEO audit FAQ
How often should I do an SEO audit?
A full audit a few times a year and after any major site change is a good rhythm. Automated crawls can run weekly between audits.
How long does an SEO audit take?
An automated crawl of a small site takes minutes. A thorough manual audit of a large site, with prioritised recommendations, can take days or weeks.
Related SEO terms
Technical SEO is making sure search engines can crawl, render and index your site, covering speed, redirects, canonicals, sitemaps and mobile.
A site health score is a single number, usually 0 to 100, that an SEO audit tool calculates from the technical issues found when it crawls a site.
A content audit is a review of every page on a site, with data, to decide which to keep, update, merge, redirect or remove.
An on-page SEO checklist is a list of items to check on each page, from intent and title tag to headings, images, links and structured data.
Core Web Vitals are Google’s three metrics for real-world page experience: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift.
A link profile is the full set of backlinks pointing to a site: who links, how many, with what anchors and attributes, and how it changes over time.