An SEO audit assesses a website's current state and uncovers opportunities for SEO improvement.
It should be the first step when working on a new site.
I’ve audited many websites in my career. Over time, I’ve developed a consistent process.
In this guide, I share my audit approach. I’ll show you what to look for and which tools help along the way.
But before diving into my process, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.
What Is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is an evaluation of how well a website is optimized for search engines. It identifies areas for improvement by analyzing:
- Technical issues
- Content quality
- Backlink profile
- User experience
You could say this process acts as an overall evaluation of a website’s “health” in search.
How to Do an SEO Audit (Step by Step)
Here are the steps I follow when performing a thorough SEO audit.
I also created a reference checklist you can keep handy to ensure you won’t miss anything important.
Now, let's explore each step in detail.
1. Make Sure Your Site Is Indexed
Is Google indexing your website?
Indexing is the process by which search engines store webpages into their database to be retrieved when users perform searches.
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.
The quickest way to check if your site is indexed is with a simple site search.
Type “site:yourdomain.com" in Google's search without the quotation marks. This operator should return most pages from your domain that Google has indexed.
If you see:
- No results: Your entire site might be blocked from indexing
- Fewer pages than expected: Some sections of your site may have indexing issues
- Strange or outdated pages appearing: You might have canonicalization problems, in which Google is confused about which version to display in search results
To get a better sense of what’s happening, use Google Search Console. It’s a free tool from Google that can offer detailed insights into your site's indexing status.
Open the tool and head to the “Pages” report from the sidebar.
Here, you can see a graph of all pages based on their indexing status.
Underneath, you’ll see a list of reasons why the pages haven’t been indexed.
It’s completely normal to have some URLs that aren’t indexed.
Here are some examples of URLs that don’t have to be indexed:
- Pages with redirects
- Admin pages
- Alternate pages with canonical tags
- Feed pages
But if you find a page that should be indexed but isn’t, fix the issue by following Google’s guidelines. Once done, hit the “Validate Fix” button.
If your site isn't indexed, no amount of optimization will help you rank in search results until you fix this fundamental issue. So make this your top priority.
2. Check for Duplicate Versions of Your Site
Having multiple versions of your website accessible to search engines can seriously dilute your SEO efforts.
I’ve seen this issue most often on newly launched websites that haven’t standardized their URL structure.
As a result, the site exists at various URL versions (depending on whether there's WWW in the domain and whether the site uses HTTPS).
Google may see each version as a separate website, splitting your authority (ranking potential) between them.
To identify whether duplicate versions exist, try accessing your site through these URLs:
- http://yourdomain.com
- https://yourdomain.com
- http://www.yourdomain.com
- https://www.yourdomain.com
Only one version should be accessible. All others should redirect to it. You should use the HTTPS version because it encrypts data between your server and users’ browsers—improving security, user trust, and even (possibly) giving you a slight rankings boost.
Just make sure to set up 301 redirects from all non‑preferred URLs to your chosen version.
3. Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking.
A poor mobile experience hurts SEO.
The easiest way to check if your site is mobile-friendly is to use this Mobile Friendliness Test Tool. Enter your website URL, and the tool will analyze the page to see if it meets mobile usability standards.
If your site isn't mobile-friendly, focus on improving these key aspects:
- Text readability: Make sure the content is easy to read without zooming
- Tap targets: Make sure buttons and links are large enough to tap accurately
- Viewport configuration: Ensure the site can properly scale according to different device sizes
- Media playback: Make sure videos and interactive elements work properly on mobile devices
- Load time: Optimize your site to load quickly on mobile networks
If you're using WordPress, most themes are mobile-optimized by default. For custom sites, work with a developer to implement responsive design principles.
4. Evaluate Your Site Speed
Site speed is a Google ranking factor—and one of the most impactful elements of user experience.
A fast-loading site tends to have lower bounce rates and better engagement, which can indirectly help your SEO efforts.
Identify major speed issues using Google's PageSpeed Insights Tool. Just enter your URL, click "Analyze," and Google will return:
- A speed score (out of 100) for both mobile and desktop
- Specific recommendations to improve performance
Work with a developer to resolve major issues causing delays. Then tackle the rest. And don’t stress about achieving a perfect score. If you get your score to the mid-80s, then you're usually in great shape. I’ve not seen noticeable SEO gains from pushing scores much higher than that.
5. Crawl Your Site for Technical Errors
A site crawl helps uncover technical issues that might be invisible on the surface but can seriously harm your SEO performance.
For this step, I recommend using a dedicated SEO crawling tool. Semrush’s Site Audit tool is my personal favorite, as it checks for over 140 technical issues—making it one of the most comprehensive solutions in the industry.
To get started, create a project in the tool and configure the audit.
Then, click “Start Site Audit.”
When the audit is done, you’ll get to a dashboard that displays your “Site Health” score.
It’s an overall indicator of your website’s SEO health that’s based on the number of issues found. And their severity.
The issues are divided into three categories in order of severity:
- Errors
- Warnings
- Notices
To go deeper, click on the “Issues” tab.
Click each issue type to see a list of all affected URLs.
Common errors include:
- Broken internal links: Links pointing to non-existent pages, causing 404 errors
- Redirect loops and chains: Multiple redirects that create cycles or unnecessarily long chains
- Orphan pages: Pages that aren’t linked to from other pages on your site, making them hard for search engines to find
- Sitemap issues: Some incorrect pages were found in your sitemap (a file on your website that contains a list of all your important pages)
- Duplicate content: Similar or identical content accessible through different URLs, which can confuse search engines
Click “Why and how to fix it” for explanations and instructions for addressing the issue.
6. Check Core Web Vitals
Google’s Core Web Vitals measure real-world user experience. And Google considers these metrics for rankings.
The three metrics are:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes to load the largest element on the page. It should ideally load within 2.5 seconds.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures how long it takes for a site to respond to user interactions. Aim for less than 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures how much the layout of the page shifts unexpectedly for the user. A score of less than 0.1 is ideal.
Sites that score well across all Core Web Vitals typically have better engagement metrics (longer time on site, lower bounce rates) than those that don’t meet these benchmarks.
Check Core Web Vitals performance in Google Search Console from the sidebar menu.
Here, you'll find separate reports for “Desktop” and “Mobile.” Click “Open Report” at the top of either chart for more details.
The report labels pages as “Good,” “Needs improvement,” or “Poor.” Expand each issue to see the affected pages.
To fix the issues identified on your pages, take these steps:
- For LCP issues: Optimize the hero image and other elements that load above the fold, improve server response times, and eliminate render-blocking resources like unnecessary CSS or JavaScript files.
- For INP concerns: Minimize JavaScript execution time, optimize event handlers, and remove unnecessary third-party scripts
- For CLS problems: Always specify width and height attributes for images and videos and use fixed-sized containers for dynamic content like ads
These optimizations are highly technical. So consider working with a developer who can analyze each page, implement the fixes, and thoroughly test the changes.
7. Review Content Quality
Quality content is critical for ranking well.
Google's algorithms have evolved to better understand whether content actually provides what users are looking for.
So when auditing your content, ask whether your content:
- Actually answers users’ questions
- Covers the topic thoroughly and accurately
- Is original rather than duplicated or lightly rewritten
- Demonstrates subject matter expertise and authority
- Is easy to skim and well-structured
- Has up-to-date information
Focus on your most important pages first. In Google Search Console the “Search results” report shows which pages are getting the most impressions and clicks.
Assess these pages closely. Do they provide genuine value?
Categorize each page as:
- Update: Content is good but needs more depth, updated information, or additional sections to fully satisfy search intent
- Rewrite: Content misses the mark or lacks authority and requires a complete overhaul
- Consolidate: Content overlaps with similar pages. Combine into one stronger page.
- Delete: Content is irrelevant or of very low quality
After categorizing your content, work on the promising pieces to improve their quality.
8. Check Your Site’s On-Page SEO
On-page SEO helps search engines understand your content.
Elements include:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Header tags (H1, H2, etc.)
- URL slugs
While these elements might seem basic, I'm consistently surprised when websites get these fundamentals wrong.
Start by examining your homepage. Open it in the Google Chrome browser, right-click, and choose “View Page Source.”
Look for:
- A concise title tag (under ~55 characters) that includes your main keyword
- A unique meta description (~120 characters) that accurately summarizes the page
- A single H1 tag that clearly communicates the main topic
- Subheadings (H2s, H3s) used logically to structure the content
- Descriptive alt text for all images that add meaning to the content
- Clean, descriptive, and keyword-rich URL structures
If you have a large site, analyzing each page manually would be time-consuming. Semrush's On Page SEO Checker can audit your on-page elements at scale.
To start, set up a project for your website. And let the tool analyze your site.
You’ll see a list of pages with recommendations for each.
Implement the recommendations to help your pages perform better.
9. Analyze Your Backlink Profile
Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. Google views them as votes of confidence. Both the quantity and quality matter.
Analyze your backlink profile during an audit using Semrush's Backlink Analytics tool. Input your URL and click “Analyze.”
You’ll see an overview report with lots of information. First, check the referring domains graph to see your link growth over time.
A steady climb is positive. Sudden drops or flat lines may need attention from your link building strategy.
Next, look at the anchor text distribution of your backlinks.
A healthy profile should have mostly branded and generic anchors, which shows that the links have been acquired naturally. If you see an excessive number of keyword-rich anchors, that's a red flag that could trigger Google penalties.
Finally, go to the "Referring Domains" tab and look at the types of sites linking to you.
Are they relevant to your industry? A fitness blog should have links from health and wellness sites, not gambling or loan websites.
I also recommend checking the "Backlinks" tab. Sort your backlinks by Authority Score (AS) to put the lowest quality links at the top:
See if anything stands out as suspicious. Maybe you have lots of links from irrelevant directories or questionable foreign domains.
In most cases, it's perfectly fine to have some low-quality links in your profile. Every site has them. Just watch for patterns that suggest manipulative link building or potential spam that could trigger a Google penalty.
If you find any problematic links, work to remove them by contacting site owners.
10. Analyze Your Organic Traffic
Organic traffic represents visits to your site from organic (unpaid) search results.
This metric is central to SEO.
Check the Google Search Console “Search results” report from the sidebar to see your total clicks and traffic trends over time. Note any sharp drops or spikes.
The “clicks” number at the top shows how many organic visits your site gets. And the chart shows how that number has changed over time.
Look for any spikes and dips in your site’s traffic.
If there are significant drops, identify what might have caused them. Sharp or sustained traffic drops are often caused by two things:
- Algorithm updates
- Manual actions (penalties applied by Google when they find your site violating their guidelines)
Google updates its algorithm quite regularly. Most of these updates are minor, but occasionally there are major updates that can significantly impact rankings. And Google will announce these major updates on their Search Central Blog.
If you notice your traffic suddenly dropping right when these major updates roll out, you'll need to research what the update targeted and fix those aspects of your site.
If you're seeing unexplained traffic drops, it might be useful to check for manual actions.
Go to the "Manual actions" report in Google Search Console to see if your site has been penalized.
Hopefully, you see a green tick that shows no issues are detected.
If there’s a manual action against your website, you'll need to address the specific violations and submit a reconsideration request.
For example, if you've been penalized for thin content (you have pages with little or no valuable information), you'll need to either substantially improve those low-quality pages with relevant, useful content or remove them entirely from your site.
See Google’s Manual Actions guide for more details.
11. Benchmark Against Competitors
Benchmarking allows you to see exactly where you stand when compared to your competitors and identify opportunities for improvement.
SEO is a multiplayer game. You’re competing with others in your space for the top spots in search rankings.
If you have a better SEO profile overall, you'll be more likely to outrank them for your target keywords.
To evaluate how you stack up against competitors, use Semrush's Domain Overview tool.
Enter your website URL and click "Search."
Once you have your site's data, you can add competitors to compare side by side. Head to the “Compare domains” tab and select up to four competitor domains. If you're not sure who your main competitors are, pick the domains the tool suggests.
The tool will give you a solid comparison of the key metrics of the selected domains. These will give you a good overview of where you're lagging behind or excelling.
To get the best overview, focus on these metrics:
- Authority Score: Shows the overall quality of domain on a scale from 1 to 100 (based on its backlinks, search traffic, and other factors)
- Organic Traffic: Shows how much organic traffic the domain receives
- Organic Keywords: Shows how many keywords the domain ranks for
- Referring Domains: Shows how many different domains link to the analyzed domain (This provides a better picture for comparison than the overall number of backlinks.)
Authority score has the strongest correlation with ranking ability. So pay special attention to this metric when comparing your site with competitors.
One of the best ways to improve this metric is by building backlinks.
In the next two steps, we'll take a look at how to get the most out of your competitors’ keywords and backlink data.
12. Find Keywords You’re Missing Out On
Look at keywords your competitors target and see whether you’re missing out on relevant keyword opportunities.
The Domain Overview comparison showed you the number of keywords they target, but it doesn't reveal the specific keywords.
You can find these keywords with Semrush's Keyword Gap tool.
Open the tool. Enter your domain and the domains of your competitors.
After you hit “Compare,” the tool will compare the sets of keywords the analyzed domains are ranking for.
Scroll down to the list of keywords and take a good look at the “Missing” and “Weak” tabs:
- Missing: Keywords the analyzed competitors rank for (but you don't)
- Weak: Keywords the analyzed competitors rank for higher than you
The list will likely reveal some hidden keyword opportunities you may not have considered.
Create new content that targets these keywords. Or optimize existing pages around them. This will help you compete more effectively in your space.
13. Find Missing Backlink Opportunities
Look for backlink opportunities your competitors have capitalized on that you haven't yet.
Remember: Backlinks are very important from a rankings standpoint.
Sites that link to your competitors are excellent prospects since they've already shown interest in your niche.
You can use Semrush’s Backlink Gap tool to find these sites.
Just enter your domain and the domains of up to four competitors:
The tool will show a list of domains that link to the analyzed competitors but not to you:
These are domains that are much more likely to link to your website since they're already linking to similar websites (your competitors).
Click on the arrow next to the number indicating the number of backlinks from a certain domain. This expands the view to show specific pages that link to your competitors. As well as the anchor text and target URLs.
Now, you can try to replicate these backlinks. Select the ones that are relevant to your website and click the “Start outreach” button in the top-right corner.
This will send the selected prospects to the Link Building tool, where you can set up a new project for your domain.
The tool will help you:
- Find even more backlink prospects from various sources
- Reach out to the domain owners and ask them for backlinks
- Keep track of the progress of your outreach campaigns
To learn more, check out this guide on how to start a link building campaign with the Link Building tool.
14. Check Your Presence in SERP Features
SERP features are the special search result formats that appear on the search results page.
These include:
- Featured snippet: A concise answer displayed near the top of the search results
- People Also Ask (PAA) box: A box that shows a related question and answer
- Image pack: A group of images that appears in the search results
- Local pack: A map with a local business listing
- AI Overview: An AI-generated summary that pulls information from multiple sources
Among others.
Appearing in these SERP features can significantly impact your visibility and click-through rates.
Since Google’s introduction of AI Overviews in 2024, the search landscape has changed dramatically.
These AI-generated summaries now appear at the top of many search results, making it even more important to optimize your content to be included as a source.
To check how often you appear in SERP features, use Semrush's Position Tracking tool.
Set up a project for your domain. Then wait for the tool to collect data on your rankings.
Once the data is collected, go to the “Overview” tab.
Here, you can see which SERP features appear for your target keywords and whether your site is featured in them.
Once you know which SERP features you're missing out on, you can start thinking about how to optimize for them.
For AI overviews, you don't need to do anything special. If you’ve been following Google's search guidelines, your content already has the potential to be featured as a source in AI summaries.
For the other SERP features, the exact optimization techniques change based on which SERP feature you're targeting.
For example, if you want to capture People Also Ask placements, identify common questions Google is showing in the PAA box. You can do this by simply searching for your target keywords and noting what questions appear in the PAA section.
Then include these questions in your content as subheadings and provide direct, concise answers right below them.
Putting Your SEO Audit Into Action
Completing a comprehensive SEO website audit is just the beginning of your optimization journey.
By following the process I've outlined in this guide, you'll uncover numerous opportunities to improve your website's performance in search results.
But finding opportunities is only half the battle—you need to act on them. Execution is important, after all.
Semrush offers a suite of SEO tools that help you both identify opportunities and execute effectively.
Sign up to get started today.