How do you audit a website for SEO?

Short answer

In order: Search Console first, then indexation, then a crawl, then templates rather than pages, then the live results against the sites beating you. Order matters more than thoroughness. Polishing pages Google cannot reach, or speeding up pages nobody searches for, is how audits waste a fortnight.

There are hundreds of SEO audit checklists online and most of them are the same list in a different order. The list is not the hard part. What matters is the sequence, because each step decides whether the next one is worth doing. Here is the order I actually work in, after fifteen years of doing this for a living.

1. Start with Search Console, not a crawler

Before anything else, open the performance report and look at the last sixteen months. You are looking for shape. A cliff on a date you can name. A slow slope. A seasonal pattern that repeats. A set of pages that earn impressions but almost no clicks. Each of those points somewhere different.

Then the page indexing report. How many pages are indexed against how many you think should be. Large numbers in “Crawled, currently not indexed” or “Discovered, currently not indexed” tell you Google has seen pages and decided they are not worth keeping, which is a different problem from Google not finding them.

Google describes search as three stages, crawling, indexing and serving, and not all pages make it through each stage. Search Console tells you which stage your pages are failing at. That alone usually halves the audit.

2. Crawl the site

Now run a crawler. You want every URL, its status code, its canonical, whether it is indexable, its title and headings, and the internal links in and out. Compare the crawl against the sitemap and against what Search Console says is indexed. The interesting findings are in the gaps: pages in the sitemap that nothing links to, pages Google indexed that you did not know existed, pages you care about sitting five clicks deep.

On one marketplace I audited, 8,317 of 9,220 indexed pages could not be reached by clicking through the site. They existed only in the sitemap. I wrote that up as a site where ninety per cent of pages were unreachable, and it is the clearest example I have of why the crawl and the index have to be compared rather than read separately.

3. Think in templates, not pages

Most sites have five to fifteen page templates: home, category, product or service, location, article, and a few others. Almost every technical problem lives in a template and repeats across every page using it. So group the crawl by template and look at one representative of each. A missing canonical on the product template is one fix, not four thousand.

This is also where you check rendering. If the site relies on JavaScript, compare the source with the rendered page for each template. Content and links that only exist after scripts run are at a disadvantage.

4. Check what the pages are actually for

Take the pages that should earn money and look at the queries they rank for in Search Console. Are they matching what the searcher wants? A service page ranking for informational queries, or two pages swapping positions for the same query, are content and intent problems no technical fix will solve.

5. Look at the live results

This is the step most audits skip. Search your important queries and study who ranks. What kind of pages are they? How deep is the content? How strong are their links? Is the result page even shaped for a site like yours, or has it been taken over by directories, marketplaces or map results?

A site can pass every technical check and still lose because the sites above it are simply better answers. Only this step tells you that.

6. Then links

Look at your backlink profile and your closest competitors’. You are not counting. You are asking whether the links you have come from places a real audience reads, and whether anything in there looks bought. Historic link damage is one of the more common reasons a technically clean site cannot move.

7. Rank what you found

Blockers first. Anything stopping important pages being crawled or indexed.
Then template fixes. One change, many pages.
Then intent and content. The pages that should rank and do not match the query.
Then everything else, and be ruthless. Most warnings never make it onto my list at all.

I wrote a longer version of the first hour of this as what I check first when a site should rank and does not.

How long it takes

On a small site, a careful version of this is two to three days of focused work. On a large ecommerce site with faceted navigation, a week or more, mostly in steps two and three. Either way, Google’s own guidance is that once you make changes, some take effect in a few hours and others could take several months, so decide before you deploy how you will know whether each fix worked.

If you would rather hand this to someone who does it every week, my SEO audit follows exactly this order and ends with a ranked fix list your team can work down. Fixed $500, seven working days.