How to run an SEO audit, with a free checklist.

An SEO audit is a structured look at the reasons your site is not ranking as well as it could. That is the whole job. It is diagnosis, not treatment. You are walking the property looking for the cracked foundation, the leak, the door that will not close, and writing them down in the order they matter.

Here is what an audit is not. It is not a 200-line export from a tool that flags every missing meta description on a page nobody will ever visit. Those reports exist to look impressive in a pitch deck and to scare you into a retainer. Anyone can find 180 issues on a website. The skill is knowing which six would actually move something if you fixed them next week, and being honest that the other 174 can wait or be ignored entirely. So resist the urge to fix things in the order you find them. Collect everything first, rank it second, and touch a line of code last. We will get to a prioritization method at the end.

There is a brutal logic to SEO. If Google cannot crawl your page, it cannot index it. If it cannot index it, your page does not exist as far as search is concerned, and the most beautifully written article in your category will rank exactly nowhere. This is why crawlability and indexing sit at the top of every serious audit, above the things that feel more exciting.

Google explains the mechanics plainly. Programs called crawlers explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to the index, and they respect the instructions in your robots.txt file. The trouble starts when those instructions accidentally tell Google to stay out. You can read how the crawlers behave in Google Search Central's overview of Google crawlers, the authoritative source on what Googlebot can and cannot do.

The single most useful tool here is free, and it is Google Search Console. Open the Page indexing report. It tells you, in Google's own words, which pages it can find and index and which it cannot, with the reason for every exclusion: server errors, redirects, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages marked noindex, duplicates without a chosen canonical. Google documents how to read it and fix what it surfaces in its Page indexing report help guide. If you have time for only one thing in this entire audit, spend it here. A surprising number of traffic problems turn out to be one line in a robots.txt file or a stray noindex tag left over from a site build, quietly hiding pages that should be visible.

Once Google can reach your pages, the next question is whether it understands how they relate. Your important pages should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage. Pages linked from nowhere, the so-called orphan pages, get crawled slowly or not at all. Google's own SEO Starter Guide recommends grouping topically similar pages into directories and using descriptive URLs, precisely so search engines can grasp the relationships. A logical structure is how Google figures out what your site is about and which page deserves to rank for which query. You do not need a diagramming tool. Sketch your site on paper, and if you cannot draw it cleanly, neither can Google.

On-page SEO is the part you fully control, which is exactly why it is worth getting right. Nobody has to approve it and there is no algorithm to wait on. Go page by page on your most important URLs and check the fundamentals. Does each page have a unique title tag that describes the page and includes the term someone would actually search? Is there one clear H1 that matches the topic? Does the body genuinely answer the question the page is trying to rank for, or does it dance around it? Do your images have descriptive alt text, and is the URL readable by a human?

The most common failure here is not stuffing, it is sameness: ten pages with nearly identical titles, all competing with each other, none of them winning. The fix is boring and it works. Make each page about one thing, name that thing in the title and the heading, and answer the question better than the page ranking above you. That is most of on-page SEO, and most sites leave it half-finished.

Technical health is the plumbing. Nobody compliments it. They notice only when it breaks. Three measurable things carry most of the weight. First, speed and the user experience metrics Google calls Core Web Vitals. You can find the current thresholds in Google's Web Vitals documentation: Largest Contentful Paint, which measures loading and should happen within 2.5 seconds; Interaction to Next Paint, which measures responsiveness and should stay at or under 200 milliseconds (it replaced the older First Input Delay metric in 2024, so ignore older guides that still mention FID); and Cumulative Layout Shift, which measures visual stability and should stay at or under 0.1. Google judges these at the 75th percentile of your real visits, so the experience of your slower visitors counts, not just your best-case lab numbers.

Second, mobile. Google indexes the mobile version of your site first, and has for years. The trap is a mobile layout that quietly shows less content than the desktop version. If something exists only on desktop, treat it as invisible to ranking. Pull up your key pages on an actual phone and confirm the content, the links, and the structured data are all there.

Third, the unglamorous basics that still get missed: a valid XML sitemap that lists your live pages and not your dead ones, HTTPS working everywhere with no mixed-content warnings, and a robots.txt that blocks what it should and nothing it should not. These sound trivial. They are also the kind of thing that takes down a third of the sites we look at, usually right after a redesign or a migration.

Here is the part that requires a mirror. Technical fixes unlock pages that already deserve to rank. They cannot rescue pages that do not. At some point you have to ask whether the content is actually good and answer truthfully. The useful questions are simple. Does this page answer the searcher's question better than the pages currently outranking it, or did we just want it to exist? Is it written by someone who clearly knows the subject, or assembled to hit a word count? Is it current, or is it quietly telling people something that stopped being true two years ago? Google's guidance keeps circling the same idea: create helpful, reliable, people-first content. That is not a slogan. It is the lens the ranking systems are built to approximate.

When you audit content, you are usually looking for three things. Thin pages that say almost nothing and should be improved or merged. Outdated pages that once ranked and have been sliding as the information aged, which are often your best opportunity because they already have history and links. And gaps, the questions your customers ask that you have never answered, which competitors are quietly ranking for. You do not need a six-figure content budget for any of this. You need to be honest about which of your pages a reader would actually thank you for.

Backlinks, the links from other sites pointing to yours, are still a real ranking signal, and also where audits go to die. Keep this pass deliberately shallow. Note any obviously toxic or spammy links (Google usually ignores these on its own, so do not panic). Redirect your broken pages that still have other sites linking to them, the 404s with backlinks, because that recovers value you already earned. And glance at where competitors get links that you do not. Ahrefs lays out a sane, full-length version in its guide to running an SEO audit if you want to go deeper later. For now, note what you find and move on. Links are a long game, not an afternoon.

Print this, or paste it into a doc, and work top to bottom. The order is the point. Each block matters less than the one above it, so if you run out of time, you have still done the parts that move the needle. For the crawl itself, a tool helps. Screaming Frog's SEO Spider crawls up to 500 URLs free and surfaces broken links, redirects, duplicate titles, and missing tags in one pass, which covers most small sites without spending a dollar.

• Crawlability and indexing (do this first). Open Google Search Console's Page indexing report and read every exclusion reason. Check robots.txt for accidental blocks. Hunt for stray noindex tags. Confirm your important pages are actually indexed.
• Site structure. Confirm key pages are within three clicks of the homepage. Find orphan pages with no internal links. Make sure internal links point to the pages you most want to rank.
• On-page basics. Unique, descriptive title tag on every important page. One clear H1. Body content that answers the target question. Descriptive alt text. Readable URLs. No two pages competing for the same term.
• Technical health. Check Core Web Vitals (LCP under 2.5s, INP at or under 200ms, CLS at or under 0.1). Confirm mobile shows the same content as desktop. Validate the XML sitemap. Confirm HTTPS everywhere.
• Content quality. Flag thin pages to improve or merge. Find outdated pages that are sliding and refresh them. List the customer questions you have never answered.
• Backlinks (keep it short). Note any obviously toxic links. Redirect broken pages that still have inbound links. Glance at competitor link sources for ideas. Then stop.

A list of problems is not a plan. The step everyone skips is turning the findings into an ordered queue, and it is the step that separates an audit that improves your site from a PDF that improves your anxiety.

Use two axes for every issue: impact and effort. Now you have four buckets. High impact and low effort is your first day of work, the indexing block and the broken redirect and the missing title on your top page. High impact and high effort goes on the roadmap, like a slow mobile experience or a content overhaul. Low impact and low effort is filler you can knock out when you are bored. Low impact and high effort is the 174 issues the automated report wanted you to panic about, and you can safely leave them alone.

This is exactly why the giant PDF fails. It refuses to make this call for you, so everything looks equally urgent and nothing gets done. Make the call. Fix the top bucket this week, schedule the second, and forget the fourth without guilt. Search Engine Journal's SEO audit checklist is useful if you want a fuller list of what to inspect, but the prioritizing is yours to do, and it is where the value lives.

A self-run audit will get you most of the way on a small site, and it will tell you the truth about whether your problems are technical, structural, or simply that the content is not good enough yet. That clarity alone is worth the afternoon. Do not expect overnight ranking changes, and be suspicious of anyone who promises them. Search rewards consistency over months, not heroics over a weekend.

The honest limit is this. A checklist tells you what to look at. It cannot tell you which of forty findings matters most for your specific business and your goals, and that judgment is the entire game. Untangling a messy redesign, reading conflicting signals in Search Console, deciding whether to rebuild a section or rewrite it, that is the kind of work we do at Mining Wells when an audit turns up more than a spare afternoon can handle. Plenty of sites do not need that. Run the checklist, fix the top bucket, and see how far it carries you. Often it is further than you would think.