How to Run an SEO Audit

Always start with indexation, because nothing else matters if the page is not in the index. Open Search Console's coverage report and read the exclusions before you read the valid pages. The exclusions are where audits earn their keep: pages excluded by a noindex tag that should never have shipped, pages blocked by robots.txt, duplicates Google canonicalised somewhere unexpected, and soft 404s where a thin page was judged not worth storing.

Cross-check with a site: search and with the sitemap report. If the sitemap lists two hundred URLs and the index holds ninety, the gap is the audit. Do not write a word of new content until you can explain every exclusion in that gap, because the same template or configuration flaw that excluded those pages will quietly exclude anything new you publish.

Our SEO Readiness Audit automates this first pass for a single URL: it fetches the page as a crawler would, checks the robots policy, the canonical, the sitemap membership and the indexability signals, and reports what it actually found rather than what should be there.

Export every title and meta description — Screaming Frog or a simple crawl does this in minutes — and sort by the failures that matter. Missing titles, duplicated titles, and titles over sixty characters that truncate mid-word are the three worth fixing first, because they either hand control of your snippet to Google or make two pages compete as twins.

Then check that every page has exactly one H1 that names its topic, and that the H2s beneath it read as a sensible table of contents. The heading audit is really a content-structure audit in disguise: if you cannot tell from the headings alone what the page covers, neither can a parser, and the page will underperform on passage-level retrieval even if its prose is excellent.

You cannot read everything, so triage with data. Pull the pages that get impressions but poor click-through — the content is ranking and losing the click, which points at titles and intent mismatch. Pull the pages that get no impressions at all — these have a retrieval or relevance problem. Pull the pages with high exit rates from organic landing — the content may be thin or misaligned with the query that brought the visitor.

For each flagged page, ask one question: if I searched the target query and landed here, would I need to go back to Google for anything? Every 'yes' is a missing section. The pages that win competitive queries are almost never the longest; they are the ones that leave the searcher with no follow-up question unanswered.

Crawl the site and count internal links pointing to each page. The pattern to find is orphaning: important pages reachable only through the sitemap or a deep paginated archive. Pages earn a share of the site's authority through the links that point at them, and an orphaned page is one its own publisher appears not to value — Google reads the signal exactly that way.

Check the shape as well as the counts. Every important page should be within two or three clicks of the homepage, linked with descriptive anchor text rather than 'read more', and should link onward to its siblings. A hub page per topic cluster, linking down to the detail pages and collecting links back, is the simplest structure that consistently works.

Score every finding on two axes: how much traffic the affected template or page type represents, and how expensive the fix is. A noindex on the blog template is one line of code affecting every post — top of the list. A slightly long title on a page with twelve impressions a month is real but belongs at the bottom.

Assign each fix an owner and a verification step. 'Fixed' means the new HTML is live and the specific evidence from the audit no longer appears — not that a ticket was closed. Re-crawl after deployment, and use Search Console's validate button on coverage issues so Google re-examines the affected URLs promptly.

Then schedule the next audit. Sites drift: templates change, new sections ship, redirects rot. A quarterly light audit against a fixed checklist catches drift while it is still cheap to fix.