I once inherited a site that had quietly lost most of its organic traffic, and the team was convinced Google had penalized them. It had not. A developer had shipped a noindex tag sitewide during a staging push and nobody caught it for weeks. That is the whole reason I run audits in a fixed order: the issue that kills your traffic is rarely the one everyone is talking about. This SEO audit checklist is the exact sequence I work through, top to bottom, so the silent traffic-killers get caught first.
Most checklists you find online are a long flat list of items with no priority, which is useless when you are staring at a sick site and need to know what to fix first. So I have organized this one by leverage, not by category. We start where the biggest, most invisible damage hides, and we end with the polish.
The stakes are high because most pages never get found at all. Ahrefs studied its index and found that 96.55% of all pages get zero traffic from Google. A disciplined audit is how you keep your pages out of that 96.55%.
How to Use This SEO Audit Checklist
Work it in order. The sequence is deliberate, because fixing a meta description on a page Google cannot even crawl is wasted effort.
Here is the order of operations, from highest leverage to lowest:
- Crawlability - can search engines reach your pages at all
- Indexation - are the right pages in the index, and the wrong ones out
- Technical health - speed, mobile, structured data, security
- On-page - titles, headings, intent match, metadata
- Content - depth, freshness, cannibalization, thin pages
- Internal linking and backlinks - authority flow inside and into the site
A quick note on tooling before we start. You do not need an expensive stack. The free tier of the toolset below covers the vast majority of what matters.
| Audit layer | Free tool I default to | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Crawlability | Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) | Can bots reach and follow my pages |
| Indexation | Google Search Console | Which pages Google actually indexed |
| Speed and vitals | PageSpeed Insights | Is the page fast and stable on real devices |
| On-page | Manual review plus a crawler | Do titles and content match intent |
| Backlinks | Ahrefs or Semrush free views | Who links to me, and is anything broken |
Step 1: Crawlability - Can Bots Even Reach Your Pages
This is where I always start, because nothing downstream matters if crawlers get blocked. I have seen a single misplaced line in a robots file wipe out an entire section's visibility.
Check robots.txt and meta robots
Pull up your robots.txt file at the root domain and read it line by line. The classic disaster is a Disallow: / that survived from a staging environment. Then spot-check key templates for a noindex in the page source or HTTP header.
- robots.txt - confirm nothing important is disallowed
- Meta robots - check for stray noindex or nofollow on money pages
- XML sitemap - present, submitted in Search Console, and free of dead URLs
Look for crawl traps and broken links
Run a crawl and watch for explosions of near-identical URLs, usually caused by faceted navigation or session parameters. These burn crawl budget on large sites and bury the pages you care about. Flag every 4xx and 5xx response, and map your redirect chains so nothing hops more than once.
Step 2: Indexation - The Right Pages In, The Wrong Pages Out
Crawlable does not mean indexed. This step is where I catch the quiet traffic killers, and it is the single most underrated part of any audit.
Compare crawled, indexed, and intended
Open the Pages report in Search Console and read the "not indexed" reasons closely. "Crawled - currently not indexed" and "Discovered - currently not indexed" usually point at quality or duplication problems, not bugs. "Excluded by noindex tag" is the one I check first, because that is the exact failure from my opening story.
On modern JavaScript-heavy builds, this report is also where you catch a site that renders entirely client-side and never gets indexed, because Google sees an empty shell instead of your content.
Checklist items:
- Indexed count - roughly matches your number of valuable pages
- Noindex - applied only to pages you genuinely want hidden
- Canonicals - each page points to the version you want ranked
- Duplicates - parameter and pagination variants resolved cleanly
Canonical sanity check
Spot-check canonical tags on templates that mass-produce pages, like product listings or tag archives. A self-referencing canonical is usually correct. A canonical pointing at the homepage from every page is a common, traffic-leaking mistake I find more often than I would like.
Step 3: Technical Health - Speed, Mobile, and Security
Once Google can reach and index your pages, you make those pages fast, stable, and trustworthy. This is the layer most people start with, which is exactly backwards.
Core Web Vitals and mobile
Check your Core Web Vitals in Search Console and confirm the mobile experience holds up, because Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If your phone layout strips content or links that exist on desktop, that content effectively does not exist to Google.
Security and structured data
Confirm HTTPS is enforced sitewide with no mixed-content warnings. Then validate your structured data with Google's Rich Results Test. Schema will not magically lift rankings, but valid markup unlocks rich results, and broken markup quietly forfeits them.
Key checks:
- HTTPS - enforced, with HTTP redirecting to HTTPS
- Core Web Vitals - LCP, INP, and CLS in the good range on mobile
- Structured data - validates without errors on key templates
- Hreflang - correct and reciprocal if you run multiple languages
Step 4: On-Page - Titles, Intent, and Metadata
Now we are at the layer most people think of as "SEO." Here I am checking whether each page actually answers the query a person typed.
Title tags and headings
Every indexable page needs a unique, descriptive title that leads with the primary keyword and reads like something a human would click. Run your crawler's filter for missing, duplicate, and over-length titles. Then confirm each page has a single, sensible H1 and a logical heading structure beneath it.
Search intent match
This is the judgment call no tool makes for you. Search your target keyword and look at what already ranks. If the top results are comparison posts and yours is a product page, you have an intent mismatch that no amount of metadata tweaking will fix. Match the format the SERP is rewarding, or change the keyword.
| On-page element | Common failure I find | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Title tag | Duplicated across templates | Make each unique and intent-led |
| H1 | Missing or multiple per page | Exactly one, descriptive |
| Meta description | Auto-generated or empty | Write a compelling, accurate summary |
| Intent | Format does not match the SERP | Re-shape the page to the dominant result type |
Step 5: Content - Depth, Freshness, and Cannibalization
A technically perfect page with shallow content still loses. This step is about whether the content earns the ranking.
Find thin and cannibalizing pages
Look for pages that target the same keyword and compete with each other, splitting your authority. Consolidate them into one strong page and redirect the rest. Then flag thin pages that exist only to "have a page" - they dilute site quality and rarely justify their place in the index.
Content audit items:
- Thin content - improve substantially, consolidate, or remove
- Cannibalization - merge competing pages into one canonical winner
- Freshness - update pages where the information has aged out
- Coverage - fill obvious subtopic gaps the top results all cover
Tie content back to reporting
Audits are not one-and-done, so decide upfront how you will track whether your fixes worked.
Step 6: Internal Links and Backlinks
Last, because it is the polish, not the foundation. But internal linking is the most overlooked lever on this entire list.
Internal linking
Make sure your most important pages are not buried five clicks from the homepage. Strong, descriptive internal links from relevant pages pass authority and signal what matters. I treat orphan pages, the ones with no internal links pointing at them, as a priority fix.
Backlink health
Scan your backlink profile for broken inbound links pointing at dead URLs, then recover that equity with a redirect. You do not need to obsess over a "toxic links" cleanup for most sites. Focus on reclaiming links you already earned that are currently wasted.
When to Bring in a Specialist
You can run this entire SEO audit checklist yourself, and for most sites you should. The exception is when your diagnosis lands somewhere ambiguous - a penalty you cannot confirm, an indexation pattern that defies explanation, or a migration gone wrong. At that point, the cost of guessing exceeds the cost of an expert.
The Takeaway: Work the SEO Audit Checklist in Order
The reason this SEO audit checklist works is not the items on it. It is the order. By the time you reach titles and content, you already know Google can crawl, index, and trust your pages, so every later fix actually has a chance to move the needle.
Run it top to bottom. Resist the urge to start with the fun on-page tweaks, because the silent killers - a stray noindex, a broken canonical, an unreachable section - hide at the top of the list, and they are the ones quietly costing you the most.
