The 18-Step SEO Audit Checklist for 2025 + Free Template

A sitemap.xml is essentially a list of all pages on your website that you want search engines to discover, crawl and index. It also lives on the root folder in most cases and can be found at domain.com/sitemap.xml. Keywords are essential to SEO, since they are what users search for when they are researching. Using a tool like Keywords Everywhere can help you find keywords, but you still need to integrate them.

How to conduct a website audit: 10 elements to review

When checking for gaps, examine SERP rankings, traffic, and click-through rates. Low rankings, traffic, and visitor retention suggest that people aren’t getting what they want from your content. Due to the algorithm’s ever-changing nature, spotting dips in organic traffic performance is essential to maintaining and growing visibility. To evaluate traffic, Google Search Console offers a free analysis tool.

Share Your Performance

Systematically checking indexing, technical performance, on-page SEO, and backlinks, helps you to address any issues before they affect your rankings. Implementing  practices makes sure your site remains competitive and well-optimized for search engines. On-page SEO elements like meta tags, headings, and internal links are essential for communicating the relevance of your content to search engines. Cadence helps the document processing service provider (mentioned above) by updating these elements with the right keywords, which improved their site visibility. Broken links are URLs that point to a website that no longer exist or return an error.

Issues with meta descriptions

It will not cost you a lot, and you have to do it to improve your SEO rankings and conversions. From my experience talking to clients, handling website page speed is one of the most challenging tasks, at least for non-technical users. Lighthouse is an effective tool for identifying a range of improvements related to mobile usability, which is a critical aspect of the page experience. For Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures loading performance, ensure that the largest content piece on your page loads within 2.5 seconds. If it takes longer, you might need to optimize your server, use a content delivery network, or optimize your images and file formats. Core Web Vitals is a set of specific metrics that Google considers essential in a webpage’s overall user experience.

Firstly, you will need to access Google Search Console, which is the go-to tool for getting basic audit data and assessing your rankings from Google’s perspective. Prior to starting with an SEO audit checklist, you need to set up analytics tools. When I was leading marketing for PlushCare, a telemedicine provider that was acquired for $450M, we did some crazy things in the name SEO Anomaly of search engine optimization (SEO). Google Search Console is one of the best free SEO tools for analytics. It shows you how Google and most search engines see your site. Screaming Frog can crawl your site like a search engine spider.

• This is exactly the type of content that Google’s human quality raters (and algorithm) are designed to flag.
• Test your website’s loading speed by using Google PageSpeed Insights or with Morningscore’s website speed test.
• Our comprehensive SEO audit explores on-page, off-page, and technical aspects to pinpoint problems and uncover opportunities.
• All these tools and more come together to help us understand your current SEO position – and your potential for the future.

Broken links are like dead ends – they direct users to URLs that are inaccessible or no longer exist. As a result, users leave your website, and the link juice drains into nowhere. The more broken links you have, the higher the likelihood that Google may treat your content as spam. The first step in our SEO audit checklist is to run an in-depth site scan to gather all website pages and resources like CSS, images, videos, JavaScript, and PDFs. This approach sets the stage for a thorough analysis of your entire site.

Naturally, if you’re creating a new piece of content, it’ll be easier to make sure you fully optimize all these elements. If you’re updating old pages, you just have to do the best you can. It wouldn’t necessarily make sense, for instance, to change a URL simply to optimize for a new keyword.

Do some extra digging to make sure you don’t miss any you’re not aware of, such as accounts started by other departments. Your brand’s online performance can also be impacted by social media. If your social media presence isn’t pushing more traffic to your website, then it’s time to conduct a social media audit.

I once took over an SEO project where the client was confused about why none of their pages were ranking. After a quick audit, I discovered their developer had pushed a sitewide “noindex” tag to production by mistake. This effectively prevented all of their pages from appearing in search results. I also created a reference checklist you can keep handy to ensure you won’t miss anything important. SEOptimer is a Website SEO Checker which reviews these and more to help identify problems that could be holding your site back from it’s potential.

When selecting an SEO agency to perform an SEO audit, we recommend asking for relevant client testimonials and case studies. To get the most from an SEO audit, the agency must understand your business, products/services, and customers. And don’t forget to grab our SEO audit checklist for a quick revision later on. I know, tackling a technical SEO audit may seem daunting at first sight. But I hope that following the instructions of my technical SEO audit checklist will help you nail this task and maintain your website in good shape. You can check the state of your schema markup in Google Search Console.