How to Do an SEO Audit: The Order That Works

How to do an SEO audit, in short: establish a baseline in Search Console, crawl the site, confirm the pages that matter are indexed, review on-page elements, judge content against intent and quality, review your links, and check whether AI assistants can reach and cite you. Then rank every finding by impact before fixing anything. The order matters because each step explains the results of the next.

This walkthrough is for owners, marketers and in-house SEOs doing an audit themselves. It is tool-agnostic, names the free tool for each step, and ends with a way to prioritize findings so the audit produces a short action list rather than a 200-row spreadsheet. The line-by-line technical checks live in our technical SEO checklist for AI search; this page is the process that surrounds them.

On this page

• What an SEO audit is for, and where to start
• Step 1: Crawl the site
• Step 2: Are the right pages indexed?
• Step 3: Review on-page elements
• Step 4: Assess content quality and intent
• Step 5: Review links
• Step 6: Check AI visibility
• How do you prioritize SEO audit findings?

What an SEO audit is for, and where to start

An SEO audit finds the reasons a site gets less search traffic than it could, and ranks them by what to fix first. It is not a score. The “SEO score” from an automated checker is a count of rule violations, many of which have no effect on rankings.

Start with two things before any tool runs. First, a list of the 10 to 30 pages that matter commercially: service pages, top products, lead-generating guides. Every finding will be judged by whether it affects these. Second, a baseline from Search Console. Google’s guide to debugging traffic drops recommends viewing the last 16 months of Performance data and comparing periods, which shows seasonality and any sudden changes worth explaining. Export clicks, impressions and position by page and by query.

The diagram shows the order of work and the free tool for each step.

Step 1: Crawl the site

A crawl shows you the site the way a search engine’s crawler meets it: every URL it can reach by following links, with its status code, title, canonical and directives. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is the common choice, and its free version crawls up to 500 URLs, enough for most small business sites. Set the crawler to a smartphone user agent so you audit the mobile version of each page.

What to pull from the crawl:

• Status codes: 4xx errors on linked URLs, 5xx server errors, and redirect chains (a redirect pointing to another redirect).
• Directives: pages carrying noindex or blocked by robots.txt that should not be.
• Canonicals: pages whose canonical points somewhere unexpected. Our canonical tag guide explains the rules.
• Duplicates: repeated titles and descriptions, a sign of template problems.
• Depth and orphans: important pages more than three or four clicks from the homepage, or reachable only through the XML sitemap.
• Rendering: if key content appears only after JavaScript runs, compare the raw HTML with the rendered page. This matters more for AI crawlers, as covered in JavaScript rendering and AI crawlers.

Record findings with the URL count affected. “Duplicate titles on 312 product pages” is a template fix; “one broken link” is a two-minute task.

Step 2: Are the right pages indexed?

Indexation is where most serious audit findings live, because a page that is not indexed cannot rank no matter how good it is. Open the Page indexing report in Search Console. Google’s documentation for it makes a point auditors often miss: you should not expect all URLs to be indexed, only canonical pages. The job is to confirm every important page is indexed and every excluded page is excluded for a good reason. The decision tree below is how to triage the excluded list.

“Crawled - currently not indexed” on an important page is the finding to take most seriously. Google fetched the page and decided it was not worth indexing, which usually points to thin or duplicative content, or a page with too few internal links to signal it matters. For causes behind each status, see our list of technical SEO issues.

Step 3: Review on-page elements

On-page review checks that each priority page clearly states its topic in the places search engines and readers look first. Work from the crawl export and the live pages, against Google’s SEO Starter Guide:

• Titles unique to each page, clear, and accurately describing it.
• Meta descriptions short and unique to the page.
• Headings that organize the content for readers. The Starter Guide notes heading order does not matter to Google Search, so do not log out-of-order headings as errors.
• Internal links and anchor text describing the destination. Google’s link best practices warn against generic anchors such as “click here.” See our internal linking guide.
• Core Web Vitals on the priority templates, against the web.dev thresholds: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, CLS of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile.

Step 4: Assess content quality and intent

The content review asks whether each priority page deserves to rank for its target query, and it needs the live results page, not a tool. For each page, search its main query and compare page type, format and depth with the top results. A service page competing against ten guides has an intent problem that no amount of on-page polish will fix.

Then apply the questions in Google’s helpful content guide: does the page offer original information or analysis, is it clear who wrote it, and would someone who arrived directly find it useful? Check two structural issues while you are here:

• Cannibalization: two or more of your URLs appearing for the same query in Search Console, often swapping positions.
• Decay: pages whose clicks have declined steadily across the 16-month baseline.

Step 5: Review links

The link review covers backlinks pointing in and links pointing out. Search Console’s Links report shows a sample of your top linked pages, top linking sites and top linking text, plus your most internally linked pages. That is enough to spot the pattern: are your important pages earning links, or is all the link equity landing on the homepage and old blog posts? Use internal links to pass it on.

Outbound, check that paid, sponsored or affiliate links carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". Google’s spam policies treat paid links that pass ranking credit as link spam, but say it is not a violation when those links are qualified. Also check for the opposite mistake: a CMS setting that adds nofollow to every outbound link, including the sources you cite. Nofollow links explains when each value applies.

Step 6: Check AI visibility

The AI visibility check confirms that AI assistants can reach your pages and are allowed to quote them, and then tests whether they do. Three checks:

1. Access. Read your robots.txt for AI crawler rules. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites should allow OAI-SearchBot to appear in ChatGPT search results; GPTBot is a separate crawler used for training. Our guide to robots.txt for AI crawlers lists the others.
2. Eligibility. Google’s AI features documentation says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A stray nosnippet or max-snippet:0 removes it; Google’s robots meta tag documentation says nosnippet also prevents content being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
3. Presence. Run 10 to 20 prompts your customers would ask in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Record whether you are named or cited, and whether the description is accurate. Our free AI SEO audit tool checks the technical side automatically.

How do you prioritize SEO audit findings?

Score every finding on impact, scope and effort, and sort by the result. Impact asks whether it affects priority pages or revenue. Scope asks how many URLs are affected. Effort asks how long the fix takes and who has to do it. The table shows a simple scoring grid.

The rows are hypothetical examples to show how the scoring works. The matrix below shows where findings typically land.

A good audit report opens with the top five findings, each with the evidence, the affected URLs, the fix and an owner. Everything else goes in an appendix. If the audit is for a competitive market, add a short comparison with the two or three sites outranking you, covered in SEO competitor analysis.

Turning how to do an SEO audit into a routine

Knowing how to do an SEO audit matters most after the first one, because the second audit is where you learn whether the fixes worked. Keep the baseline export, the crawl and the findings list with dates. Re-run the full process once a year and after any redesign, migration or platform change, and between audits follow the monthly loop in how to improve SEO.

Can a chatbot do it for you? Not the parts that need data it cannot see: your Search Console, your index status, your full crawl. It is useful for summarizing exports and drafting fixes. What audits cost when you pay someone, and what the price should include, is covered in AI SEO audit pricing. If you would rather have the whole process done, including the AI visibility step across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode, that is our AI visibility audit.