An SEO audit is a structured review of everything that affects how your site appears in search. A good one finishes with a short list of actions in priority order. This walkthrough shows how to run one yourself, and where it helps to bring in a specialist.
Before you start: set a goal and gather access
Decide what you want from search: leads, sales, calls or sign-ups. Then collect access to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and pick a crawler such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or a similar tool. Note your main competitors, which are the sites that appear for your target searches, and may differ from the businesses you compete with offline.
Step 1: Check crawlability and indexation
Crawl the site and compare the results with the Pages report in Search Console. Find pages that return errors, redirect more than once, carry a noindex tag or are blocked. Confirm that the pages you want to rank are indexed, and that pages you do not want in search, such as internal search results or staging copies, are not.
Step 2: Review site speed and mobile experience
Use the Core Web Vitals report and PageSpeed Insights to see which templates are slow. Test your key pages on a phone. Pay attention to large images, heavy scripts and layout shifts that move buttons as the page loads.
Step 3: Audit on-page elements
Export your page titles, meta descriptions and headings. Look for missing, duplicated or truncated titles, pages with no H1, and several pages that target the same keyword. Check that each page has a clear topic and that the title reflects it.
Step 4: Evaluate your content
List your pages with their clicks and impressions from Search Console. Pages with impressions but few clicks may need better titles. Pages that rank on the second page may need more depth. Pages with no traffic for a long time may need to be improved, merged or removed. Compare your top pages with competing results to see what topics you are missing.
Step 5: Inspect internal links
Find your most important pages and check how many internal links point to them. Look for orphan pages, weak anchor text and links that pass through redirects. Strong internal links help distribute authority to the pages that matter most.
Step 6: Review your backlink profile
Use a link tool to see who links to you. Look for the quality and relevance of linking sites, the spread of anchor text and any suspicious patterns such as many links from unrelated or spammy domains. Then compare your profile with your competitors to find sites that link to them and not to you.
Step 7: Check local and e-commerce factors
For local businesses, review your Google Business Profile, listings and reviews. For online stores, check category structure, product page templates, faceted navigation and product schema.
Step 8: Study the competition
Look at the top three or four results for your main searches. Note how long and detailed their pages are, how they are structured and what kinds of links they have. This tells you what it takes to compete.
Step 9: Prioritize with impact and effort
List every finding and score it on two things: how much it could improve results, and how hard it is to fix. Start with high-impact, low-effort items, then plan larger projects. Many audits fail because they hand over a huge list with no order. A short roadmap that gets done beats a perfect report that sits in a folder.
When to ask for help
You can cover the basics yourself. A specialist adds value when the site is large, when traffic has dropped and the cause is unclear, or when you need a plan you can hand to developers. Our SEO audit service combines technical, on-page, content and link analysis into one prioritized plan. If the audit shows crawling problems, our technical SEO team can fix them.