SEO audit step by step - a checklist you can run on your own site

An SEO audit starts with checking whether Google can see your site at all, and only then moves on to content, speed and links. The order matters: a site excluded from the index will not earn a penny off the best copy in the world, and polishing headings while the crawler is blocked is painting walls in a house with no foundations. The first four steps of this checklist you can walk through yourself in an hour, with no premium plugins and no knowledge of code.

Below I write out what I do myself when I sit down to a new site: what I open, what I look for and what I treat as an alarm signal. There is a checklist table at the end.

An SEO audit is a list of concrete checks, not an opinion about the site

An SEO audit is an ordered review of a site focused on whether a search engine can visit it, understand it and consider it a good answer to a user’s question. The output is not a “pretty/ugly” verdict, but a list of problems ranked from the ones that block visibility down to cosmetic details.

There are four moments worth running one: before you start any SEO work, after a rebuild or a URL change, after a sudden drop in traffic from Google, and once a year as a routine. Free tools are enough to walk through the whole checklist:

Search Console needs a one-off verification that the site is yours. If you do not have it, start there - without it, half the points on this list are guesswork.

Step 1: indexing, or whether Google can see your site

The check takes a minute: type site:yourdomain.com into Google. The number of results is an approximation of how many of your pages are in the index. If the result is zero, you have a top-priority problem and the rest of the audit can wait.

1. Zero results - the site is excluded from the index or blocked. The most common cause: the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box in WordPress reading settings, ticked during development and forgotten after launch
2. Far fewer results than pages - part of your content is invisible to the crawler; the indexing report in Search Console shows the reason next to each URL
3. Far more results than pages - the index is full of duplicates, parameter versions, internal search result pages or attachments
4. Foreign content in the results - that is not an SEO problem, that is a sign of a hack, and at that point you drop the audit and go rescue the site

In Search Console open the “Pages” report and go through the not-indexed section. The most frequent entries are “Excluded by noindex tag”, “Blocked by robots.txt” and “Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical”. Each one tells you plainly what to fix.

Step 2: titles and descriptions, or what shows up in the results

The page title (title) is the single strongest on-page element and at the same time the one most often broken. You check it without any tools: open a page, look at the browser tab name or hit Ctrl+U and find the <title> tag.

What I look for on every important page:

• A unique title - if ten pages share the same title like “Home” or just the company name, you have wasted ten chances
• The key phrase up front - first what the customer is looking for, then the company name, length up to roughly 60 characters so it does not get cut off
• The description - one enticing sentence, around 150 characters; Google will not always use it, but when it does, it decides the click
• One H1 per page - matching the content, not the company logo dropped into an H1
• Human-readable URLs - /wordpress-repair/, not /?p=137; but if the site has been running for years, do not change URLs without redirects

The concrete settings I covered separately in the piece on SEO configuration in WordPress - an SEO plugin fills in the form for you, but a human still writes the titles.

Step 3: content and headings

You judge content not by length, but by whether it answers the question somebody typed into search. Open the “Performance” report in Search Console and go through the query list: those are your customers’ real words, not your idea of them.

What I tick off:

1. Does every service have its own page, rather than one paragraph on a general offer page
2. Does the first paragraph answer the question in the title directly (the same thing helps with visibility in AI answers)
3. Do the H2 and H3 headings form a logical table of contents, rather than being used to make the font bigger
4. Are there empty, under-construction or test pages sitting in the index
5. Do images have alt text - that is SEO and digital accessibility at once, mandatory for many businesses in the EU since June 2025
6. Are two pages fighting over the same phrase; if so, merge one into the other and set up a redirect

Step 4: speed and phones

Google grades a site based on its mobile version, so a speed audit starts with the phone, not the desktop. Paste the address into PageSpeed Insights and record the score for your three most important pages: the homepage, one service page and one blog post.

Three measurements matter, not the overall score:

The most common causes of weak scores are images uploaded straight from a camera, a dozen-odd plugins adding scripts to every page, and hosting running at the edge of its capacity. The measurement method itself I set out in the 15-minute speed mini audit, and for stores I go deeper in the piece on Core Web Vitals in WooCommerce.

Step 5: technical hygiene

This is the layer where I most often find quiet errors: the site looks fine, and the crawler is getting contradictory signals. Go through it in order:

• One version of the address - https:// with or without www, but one of them, everything else redirected; type all four variants into a browser and check they all land in the same place
• A valid SSL certificate with no warnings - the padlock in the address bar; an expired certificate can cut off your traffic overnight
• The robots.txt file - type yourdomain.com/robots.txt and make sure there is no Disallow: / in there
• The sitemap - yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml, submitted in Search Console and containing only URLs that belong in Google
• 404 errors - click through the menu and the footer; dead links eat crawl budget and customer patience
• Redirects after a rebuild - if you changed URLs, the old ones must point to the new ones with a 301, otherwise rankings evaporate

Step 6: internal links and what points in from outside

Internal linking is the cheapest part of an audit, because it depends entirely on you. The rule is simple: every important page should be reachable from the menu or from body content within two clicks of the homepage, and link text should say what is on the other side (“WordPress repair”, not “click here”).

For external links, common sense is enough: check the links report in Search Console and see whether sensible places point at you - industry directories, partners, clients, local portals. A sudden spike of links from shady domains is a signal not to panic-buy anything; I take that subject further in the piece on how to buy SEO without getting scammed.

The checklist to tick off

Save the results in a spreadsheet with a date. Next time the comparison takes fifteen minutes, and the differences will show whether what you are doing makes sense.

When a DIY audit stops being enough

The checklist above catches most of the errors that genuinely block visibility for small and medium sites. The boundary is where a fix requires going into the code, into server configuration or into decisions about URL structure: mass duplication, a slow site despite plugins being disabled, a domain migration, a store with thousands of filtered pages, multilingual setups.

That is where I start with a free diagnosis: I go through the site and say plainly what needs fixing, in what order and what gives the most for the least effort - including when the conclusion is “you can do this yourself over two evenings”. What such a review contains, I described in the piece on the free SEO audit. For bigger work under optimization you get a written quote before the start, with a task list and a deadline; projects are billed at a fixed price, usually 5,000-10,000 PLN net.

To be straight about it: no audit guarantees rankings. The outcome depends on competition in your industry, domain age, content quality and whether you actually implement the fixes. An audit gives you something more reliable - a list of things that are genuinely in the way today, ranked by weight.

Frequently asked questions

How long does an SEO audit take? Walking through this checklist yourself on a small company site is about an hour, plus the time to make fixes. A full technical audit of a larger site or a store is usually a few days of work, because it adds competitor analysis, URL structure and the indexing of hundreds of pages.

Can I run an SEO audit myself without knowing code? Yes, you can check most points on this list in a browser and in Search Console. Without code you will also detect problems you cannot fix yourself - and that already has value, because you know what to ask for instead of buying a retainer blind.

Where do I start after the audit? With fixing indexing blocks, then titles and speed, and only at the end with new content. That order holds for almost every small site.

How often should I repeat an SEO audit? Once a year as routine, and always after a bigger change: a rebuild, a URL change, a migration to different hosting, or a sudden drop in traffic. A short indexing and speed review is worth doing quarterly, because it takes fifteen minutes.

Sitting on this yourself and unsure where to start? I speed up and repair existing sites and stores - Core Web Vitals, outages, the features that are missing. Tell me what is happening and you will get a concrete quote with a date.