The SEO audit checklist we run on every site

If Google can’t crawl a page, or is told to leave it out, nothing else in the audit matters for that page. Small slips here do the most damage.

• Your robots.txt: whether it blocks pages, folders, or the images and scripts Google needs to see the page.
• noindex tags, often left on after a redesign or copied over from a test site.
• Your XML sitemap: whether it exists, whether Google knows about it, and whether it lists only real, working pages.
• Canonical tags that point Google away from the page you want to rank.
• Pages Google found but left out of its index, and the reason it gives.

Why it matters: a page that isn’t in Google’s index can’t rank for anything, however good it is.

Google measures how fast real visitors see and use your pages, and slow pages lose people before they read a word.

• Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the main picture or headline shows. Good is under 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint: how quickly the page reacts to a tap or a click. Good is under 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page jumps while it loads. Good is under 0.1.
• Oversized images, fonts and scripts that hold the page up, and plugins that load on every page for no reason.

How we test: on a phone connection, because that’s where most visitors are and where a slow site hurts most.

Google uses the phone version of your site to decide where it ranks, so a site that looks fine on a laptop can still be losing on a phone.

• Text size and contrast: can people read it without zooming in?
• Buttons and links: big enough to tap, and far enough apart?
• Menus, sliders and pop-ups that cover the content on a small screen.
• Content the phone version hides or drops compared with the desktop one.

What you get: separate screenshots of the phone version, with its own problems marked.

The title and description are what people see in Google’s results. The headings tell Google what each page is about.

• Page titles that are missing, repeated across pages, or cut off in the results.
• Meta descriptions that are missing, or that give a searcher no reason to click.
• Headings: one clear H1 per page, in the words people actually search with.
• Images with no alt text, and file names like IMG_2041.jpg.

Why it matters: these are often the cheapest fixes in the whole audit, and they change what people see in Google’s results.

Google ranks pages, not websites. Everything you want to be found for needs a page that answers it well.

• Services or products you offer that have no page of their own.
• Thin pages with a few lines of text, and pages that copy each other.
• Pages that compete with each other for the same search.
• Whether your pages answer the questions people actually type into Google.

Why it matters: this is where most small sites have the most room to grow.

If you serve customers in a town or an area, the map results and your Google Business Profile matter as much as your website.

• Your name, address and phone number: written as text, and the same everywhere they appear.
• Whether your website and your Google Business Profile agree with each other.
• Pages for the places you serve, if you serve more than one.

Why it matters: a phone number Google can’t read is a customer it can’t send you.

Links are how Google moves through your site, and how it judges which of your pages matter most.

• Broken links to pages that no longer exist.
• Redirect chains and loops that slow visitors and crawlers down.
• Orphan pages that no other page links to.
• Whether your most important pages get links from the rest of your site.

Why it matters: fixing your own links costs nothing but time, and helps Google find and value your key pages.

Structured data is a set of labels in your page’s code that tells Google exactly what is on it: a business, a product, a price, opening hours.

• Whether your pages carry structured data at all.
• Errors and missing fields in the data you already have.
• The right types for what you do: a local business, a product, an article.
• Whether the data matches what visitors actually see on the page.

Why it matters: it doesn’t push a page up on its own, but it helps Google understand your pages and show them properly.