How to Do an SEO Audit: The Ultimate Checklist

If there are errors or conflicts in the JavaScript code, it can prevent certain parts of the page (or entire page) from loading and rendering properly. Google sees those pages as blank which leads to a decrease in rankings. Clicking on the Mobile section of the Page experience report will automatically switch you to the Core Web Vitals section.

Build high-quality backlinks

For example, when you partner with WebFX, your dedicated account manager conducts an in-depth audit of your site to create a personalized, data-driven strategy. We include it with your SEO package — and at no additional cost. A social audit investigates your presence on social media platforms. It looks at how many people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest share, comment, and like your content.

Doing an audit helps website owners create a plan for improvement, supporting long-term success in organic search results. Given you’re optimizing for search engines, it’s key to understand how much organic traffic you’re driving through them. Use Google’s Rich Results Test tool (free online) on a few pages to see if SEO Anomaly any schema is detected and if there are errors.

Improve your website’s on-page and technical SEO

On top of that, the majority of websites (around 80%) haven’t implemented schema markup for structured data , missing out on richer search results. These issues quietly undermine your SEO performance every day. Browse various agency websites, and you’ll notice they promote different features of their audit. For example, some emphasize the technical audit while others note the link audit included with their SEO audit services. It helps you improve your website’s on-page SEO by extracting data such as links and pages to provide you a list of common SEO issues.

• Neglecting SEO audits result in missed opportunities, declining traffic, and loss of potential customers.
• Sift through page titles and metadata, zero in on duplicate content, extract site data, even generate XML site maps with ease.
• An audit checks whether your target keywords are properly integrated into your content, headings, and meta tags.
• These foundational efforts build trust with both users and search engines.

But for huge websites – especially those with millions of URLs or daily-changing content – crawl budget becomes critical (as Google confirms in its crawl budget documentation). No matter what you hear or read on the internet, most websites don’t need to stress about crawl budget at all. Google typically handles crawling efficiently for smaller websites. I’ve audited many sites whose SEO was failing because key JavaScript-loaded content wasn’t visible to Google. In summary, the solution phase of the audit is about turning analysis into action and then into long-term habits.

If your site uses WordPress, you can use a plugin to generate your sitemap. If you can’t use a plugin, you can create an XML sitemap online. While backlinks are only rarely included in a technical SEO audit, a lack of relevant backlinks is often the number one reason good, relevant content struggles to rank. While this doesn’t represent a complete link audit, we recommend a few quick link checks to make sure you aren’t leaving rankings behind.