SEO Audit Checklist: 20 Things to Check Yourself

You do not need a tool subscription to find out what is wrong with your site. Most of what an audit turns up is visible with Google Search Console, a browser, and an hour of patience.

These twenty checks are in the order that matters: indexing first, because a page Google cannot see cannot rank no matter how good it is, then the things that decide where it sits. Work down. Stop when you find something broken in the first six and fix that before going further.

Part One: Can Google See It At All

1. Is the site indexed? Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If nothing comes back, nothing else on this list matters yet. If results come back, note roughly how many.

2. How many pages are indexed versus how many exist? Search Console → Pages. Compare the indexed count against the number of pages you believe you have. A large gap is the finding, and the report names the reason for each one.

3. Is anything blocked in robots.txt? Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. A line reading Disallow: / blocks the entire site. It belongs on staging sites and reaches production more often than anyone admits.

4. Is there a noindex tag where there should not be? In Search Console, inspect a few important URLs. WordPress has a setting — Settings → Reading → Discourage search engines — that does this across the whole site and survives launch unnoticed.

5. Does a sitemap exist and has Google read it? Search Console → Sitemaps. It should be submitted, status Success, with a discovered-URL count close to your real page count.

6. Does one version of the site serve, and do the others redirect to it? Type all four into the address bar: with and without www, http and https. Three should redirect to one. If two different versions both load, Google is seeing two sites and splitting everything between them. This one breaks sites quietly — see technical SEO.

Part Two: Does Each Page Say What It Is

7. Does every important page have a unique title? Not the business name repeated. The title describes that page and no other.

8. Does every page have its own meta description? Missing is better than duplicated, but written is better than both.

9. One H1 per page, and does it describe the page? A common failure is the same call-to-action used as the H1 across every service page, so six pages share one heading and none of them says what the page is about.

10. Do headings run in order? H1, then H2, then H3. Skipping levels for visual reasons confuses the structure for anyone and anything reading it.

11. Does each page have a canonical pointing at itself? Unless it is deliberately a duplicate. A canonical pointing somewhere else tells Google to index that page instead of this one.

12. Do images have alt text? Describing the image, not stuffed with keywords. Empty alt on a logo is the usual tell that nobody has looked.

Part Three: Will It Hold Someone Who Arrives

13. How fast is it on a phone? Run PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab, not desktop. Most traffic is mobile and most sites are tested on a laptop. Core Web Vitals covers what the numbers mean.

14. Is it usable on a phone? Not just responsive — actually usable. Tap the buttons on a real device. Check nothing requires a sideways scroll.

15. Are there broken links? Check the main navigation, the footer, and any page you link from often. Links to pages you deleted are the usual culprits.

16. How many clicks from the homepage to your most important page? If it takes four, both people and crawlers will find it less often. Two or three is the target.

Part Four: Is There a Reason to Rank It

17. Does each page target one subject, or do several compete for the same one? Three pages aimed at the same term split their own signals and none of them wins. An SEO gap analysis is the formal version of this check.

18. Is the content better than what currently ranks? Open the top three results for your target term and compare honestly. If yours is thinner, that is the finding — and it is a more useful one than any technical fix.

19. Does anything link to you from outside? Search Console → Links shows who. If the answer is almost nobody, that is usually the ceiling on everything else, and no amount of on-page work moves it — link building is the lever.

20. Can someone contact you from any page, in one step? The best ranking in the world is worth nothing if the page that earns it has no visible way to get in touch.

What to Do With the Results

Fix in the order above. A blocked site is worth more attention than a slow one; a slow site matters more than a missing alt tag. The instinct is to start with the easy cosmetic items because they are satisfying to tick off, and that is how three months disappear without the actual problem being touched.

And be honest about which category your problem is in. If checks 1 to 6 pass and 17 to 19 fail, you do not have a technical problem — you have a content and authority problem, and they take longer and cost more to fix. Most sites that feel stuck are stuck there.

This list finds the common faults. It does not tell you which one is costing you the most, which is the question a proper SEO audit answers — and if you would rather see the full range of what the work covers first, our SEO services page lists each area. If every check here passes and nothing is moving, why is my website not showing up on Google covers the less obvious causes.