SEO audit

What it means

An SEO audit is a comprehensive review of a website from a search engine's point of view: technical health, indexing, speed, content, internal and external links and competitors. The result is a list of issues and opportunities ranked by impact and effort to fix, not just generic advice.

The technical part checks whether search engines can crawl and index the site: errors, redirects, canonical URLs, duplicates, crawl budget, the mobile version and speed according to Core Web Vitals. The content part assesses whether pages answer what people are searching for.

The links part analyses internal linking, orphan pages and the backlink profile. Comparison with competitors shows where the site has gaps in content and authority and which queries are worth targeting.

How it works in practice

An audit starts with data collection: crawling the site, pulling data from Search Console and analytics, measuring speed and analysing links. Only then are findings assessed and prioritised so that the highest-impact problems, such as important pages being blocked, are tackled first.

A good audit ends with an action plan: what to fix, who will do it, how long it will take and what benefit is expected. Without a plan, the audit remains a document nobody reads.

An audit is worth doing before a redesign or migration, after a marked drop in traffic and regularly, for example once a year. On large sites with glossaries or catalogues, duplicates, internal linking and indexing need particular attention.

What to watch out for

Automated tools generate hundreds of warnings, many of them unimportant. The value of an audit lies in interpretation and prioritisation; blindly fixing every warning can consume a lot of time with no measurable benefit.

An audit is a snapshot in time. The site, search engines and competitors all change, and recommendations from two years ago may no longer apply. Results must be measured after changes are implemented and the next steps adjusted accordingly.