SEO audit
What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a structured review of a website that shows what is holding back its visibility in search and which pages earn traffic today. It covers the technical side — crawling, indexing, URLs and speed — the content side, including titles, duplication and pages that compete with each other, and the links pointing at the site from elsewhere. It ends with a prioritised list of fixes, each with the effort it needs.
Example
A window manufacturer has a 70-page site and about 1,400 visits a month from search. The audit crawls every page and finds four things:
- Twenty-three pages are not in Google’s index; Search Console lists them as “Crawled - currently not indexed”, because each carries three lines of text.
- A service page and a blog post compete for the same query, so Google alternates between them and neither reaches the first page.
- The mobile speed score is 34, and the main image on the home page weighs 2.4 MB.
- Eight addresses resolve both with and without a trailing slash, with no redirect between them.
The output is an ordered list: indexing and duplication first, speed next, copy last. Each item carries the effort it takes and what it is expected to change.
Why it matters for a business
An audit is what puts search work in order. Without one, the obvious thing gets fixed first — usually the text — while the reason the site is invisible may be a single line in robots.txt. It works the other way round as well: the audit names the pages that already bring enquiries, so a redesign does not quietly delete them.
It runs on evidence rather than opinion: Search Console, the site’s own analytics and a full crawl. That is why it belongs before a rebuild, not after it — old addresses and earning pages get written down while they still exist.
What to ask
- What is in scope — technical, content, links, local presence, or only part of it?
- Do we get a prioritised list with an effort estimate, or a general report?
- Who carries out the fixes, and which of them can our own team do?
- What is it based on: one tool, or Search Console and analytics as well?
- What gets measured three months later to show whether the audit was worth it?
An audit is also the first step in the SEO work we run: what is blocking indexing, and what brings traffic today, before a word of new copy is written.