We can’t neglect the importance of a proper SEO audit regarding your website performance. An SEO audit evaluates your website’s search engine optimization and, more importantly, highlights the errors and issues preventing it from reaching its apex.
You’ll agree that finding stubborn issues manually is a chore. We’d go as far as saying it’s impossible. However, you can do a lot with the SEO audit checklist below and a proper tool to go with it. With this setup, you’ll easily identify all website-related issues.
As a result, your website’s search engine optimization will skyrocket, letting it bask in all of its glory. This SEO audit checklist will explain everything in detail. We recommend reading carefully and applying these steps from our experts precisely for the best results.
How to Perform an SEO Audit: 11 Crucial Steps
Ranking higher on Google or any search engine requires ample effort. Many factors can influence your ranking, making it skyrocket or dwindle over time.
To prevent this, you want a high-quality tool for SEO audits, such as Semrush or even SE Ranking.
During our in-depth guide, we’ll focus mostly on these two providers, as they’re our favorites. Besides, they include all the tools you need to evaluate your website inside out. However, feel free to use any other tool if you find it more befitting or useful.
1. Get to Know Your Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is one of the most relevant things you should check. Performing an SEO audit starts with detecting the level of unpaid traffic you’re getting. We love using Semrush and its Organic Research for that. It’s easy, as all you have to do is:
- Open Organic Research
- Type in your domain
- Press Search – done!
Semrush will display the estimated number of organic traffic per month, with a neat chart that shows fluctuations. Now, this chart is very handy for detecting certain spikes and tips that you can follow through in the “Position Changes” menu.
Examine Organic Traffic With Semrush
Do you see anything unusual? An unusual dip regarding a specific page?
This isn’t without a reason. Perhaps your page has violated Google’s spam policies such as doorway abuse, cloaking, and others. To ensure this isn’t the case, you can open Google Search Console, select Manual Actions, and see if there are any.
If not, you’re good. However, if one or more manual actions are there, you should resolve them quickly. This is Google’s “action” against your site for violating one of its policies. A good example is an “unnatural” backlink that needs to be removed.
Of course, there can be many other problems you need to inspect when performing an SEO audit. Such nuances can ruin your hard work and decrease your page ranking dramatically.
2. Initiate a Website Crawl
Semrush has a dedicated Site Audit function we frequently use. In fact, we also love the one from SE Ranking which has been reviewed on our site, and which does the job wonderfully. The Site Audit tool simulates how Google crawls your website. However, there are limits dictated by your subscription level.
For example, the Semrush Guru plan is better than its Pro variant, as it can crawl 300,000 monthly pages, which will likely cover your entire site. When you set up the Site Audit tool, you’ll have to wait a bit for everything to finish, after which, all the data will appear.
Essentially, the tool revolves around the Health Score, which highlights the website’s overall performance. It’s a reflection of Errors, Warnings, and Notices, all of which will need to be solved, or at least minimized. If you click on Issues, you’ll immediately see them below.
Crawl Your Website With Semrush
Semrush will detect things like broken backlinks, the lack of meta descriptions, and other “tiny” but important problems. Moreover, you’ll also see crawlability issues if certain pages come back with the “5xx” code.
Can you use the Site Audit tool to fix these problems?
Absolutely! Semrush and SE Ranking will explain the problem and provide a solution.
All you have to do is apply the solution for each error. Also, don’t forget that an SEO audit through a website crawl should be performed regularly to avoid critical errors and setbacks.
Use SE Ranking for Site Crawling
3. Ensure Your Pages Are Indexed
Imagine you’re a singer, singing at the top of your lungs, only to see no audience. The same happens when you craft a killer page only for Google to ignore it like it’s a piece of nothing. Pages that aren’t indexed by Google have NO chance of ranking, so be aware of that.
Again, the Site Audit tool by Semrush or SE Ranking can help. Once you crawl your website, go to the Issues tab again (in Semrush). From here, find the Category drop-down menu, click on it, and select Indexability, to immediately find issues related to this aspect.
Right after, the tool will display if certain pages are unindexed. The same can be done on Google Search Console. Open it up and then select Pages from the left-hand-side menu. You’ll see Indexed and Non-Indexed pages in green and grey respectively.
Google Search Console will also display WHY certain pages aren’t indexed. Some are “in progress” and still crawled, while others lack certain SEO aspects. Remember that boosting your SEO ranking means you have to have almost the entire site indexed, except for:
- Admin pages
- Feed pages
- “Redirect” pages
- Alternate pages with canonical tags
If you find a page that should be indexed but isn’t, go to Page Indexing on Google Search Console, paste its link, and press Validate Fix. After that, Google will crawl the page and index it if the issues we mentioned earlier are resolved.
4. Perform an On-Page SEO Audit
This SEO audit checklist covers another important step; inspection of your individual pages.
As explained, the Site Audit tool inspects the whole website, but an On-Page SEO Checker from Semrush focuses on a single page and finds issues that harm your ranking.
Beware that this tool is found in SE Ranking, or even Ahrefs, but we prefer Semrush’s equivalent for the sake of simplicity. All you have to do is add one or more pages and start crawling them for issues. This takes way shorter than before because you’re not crawling the entire site.
We love Semrush specifically because it comes up with things like:
- Strategy ideas
- SERP features ideas
- Backlink ideas
- Content ideas
- Technical SEO ideas
- User experience ideas
Clicking on each gives you – obviously ideas that you can implement to boost the page ranking. These are simple suggestions to aid your content creation, page optimization, and technical perfection, maximizing your ranking on Google and other search engines.
Analyze Each Page With Semrush
5. Examine Your Core Web Vitals & Speed
We know you hate slow-to-respond sites – don’t lie by saying otherwise. Slow sites have a high bounce rate, which means users simply “bounce off” after seeing the site takes forever to load. The Site Audit tool from Semrush lets you detect slowdowns under Site Performance.
Click on it and you’ll see uncompressed pages, large images, slow page load speed, redirect loops, and so forth. Resolving these will “lube” the website and make it run anew. Another important set of parameters is titled Core Web Vitals. You can check it multiple ways.
Some of the top SEO tools like Semrush and SE Ranking also let you examine it. However, you can also use Google Search Console to find out more about these parameters. There are three of them, whose meanings are explained below:
- LCP or Largest Contentful Paint. This one indicates how long your page takes to load the largest element on it.
- INP or Interaction to Next Paint. Another speed-related parameter that measures how long the page takes to respond to user interactions.
- CLS or Cumulative Layout Shift. This parameter shows the amount of unexpected page layout shifts for the user.
All three Core Web Vitals should be in the “green” area. The red color indicates poor Core Web Vitals, while the yellow color indicates you need slight improvements. If your speed parameters and Core Web Vitals are at their optimal levels, the site functions smoothly.
To make sure Core Web Vitals are optimal, you can, again use Semruh or Google Search Console, both of which will highlight and explain root causes. You can follow the instructions to resolve the problems accordingly.
6. Remove Duplicate Versions of Your Website
Your site should have one version indexed by Google – not 5, 6, 10, or more. This important step on our SEO audit checklist will ensure this is the case. First, you want to check for duplicate versions, which you can do by accessing your site via different addresses.
Some of these include:
- https://site.com
- http://www.site.com
- http://site.com
- https://www.site.com
As you can see, these are different addresses, despite looking so similar. Try all four out and if the website is accessible via at least two, chances are you have duplicates. This further complicates things for Google regarding ranking, indexing, and crawling your site.
Henceforth, your ranking can plummet, as Google will struggle to keep up with all of the versions of your sites, and by extension, pages. What can you do if you have a duplicate website? Simply ensure all duplicate versions redirect the user to the original site.
Let’s say you want your address to be “https://www.site.com”. In that case, all other duplicate versions should have a 301 Redirect to remedy the problem.
7. Perform an SEO Backlink Audit
We know backlinks are wildly important for achieving higher rankings. That’s why your SEO auditing strategy should involve evaluating your backlink profile. Semrush and SE Ranking have great Backlink Audit tools that will tell you more about it.
For example, the Backlink Analytics tool will tell you plenty. Information about the authority score, number of backlinks, referring domains, etc. Referring domains are very important too, because they signify the number of domains pointing to your website.
The authority score we mentioned is based on the quality of your backlink profile. If more “reputable” sites link to your domain, the authority score will be high. Toxic or broken backlinks will reduce the score and harm your ranking in the long run.
To find potential issues, you can use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool. It’ll highlight toxic AND broken backlinks that you can resolve in seconds. However, there’s also the Disavow tool, which lets you remove low-authority or toxic backlinks that hinder your ranking.
Remove Toxic Backlinks With Semrush
8. Inspect Your Website’s Mobile-Friendliness
If you examine Google’s recent algorithm changes, you’ll see it values mobile-friendliness.
Sure, your site must be fast and that can be done with an excellent hosting provider and other SEO audit tips on our list. However, being mobile-friendly is something else.
Sites with a poor mobile experience dwindle compared to those on the other end of the spectrum. Luckily, you can again use Semruh and its Site Audit tool to get a hold of it. When you set up the page-crawling process, under “User Agent“, select “SiteAuditBot-Mobile.”
You can find this option in Step 2 of the setup process, under “Crawler Settings.” This will make the crawler display mobile-related issues after crawling, which helps tremendously. Again, you’ll get detailed instructions on how to fix the given issues in quick succession.
We can also mention PageSpeed Insights; a clever page to check your site’s mobile-friendliness. It also displays Core Web Vitals on both mobile and desktop platforms. More SEO audit tips to improve your mobile performance include:
- Make the site more responsive through a streamlined design.
- Focus on mobile-friendly content by improving readability and using shorter sentences that fit better on a small display.
- Use quality images that are easier to read and grasp on smaller mobile devices.
Detect Mobile-Related Site Issues With Semrush
9. Look At Your Internal Linking Profile
Internal linking is your cheat code to better ranking. Google loves them because they aid site crawling and ease the visitor’s site navigation. This article sports at least a few internal links that help you reach more relevant pages more easily. We mentioned Semrush a lot.
Now, you’re wondering if the tool is really that good. Well, by clicking on this Semrush review, you can find out what our experts think of it – there you go. Speaking of it, Semrush’s Site Audit is again the star of the show that ranks your internal linking.
After the crawling process is done, click on Internal Linking to discover errors, warnings, and notices. Semrush’s intuitive nature swims on top here, as each issue is followed by concise suggestions for resolution. The most notable is the ILR or Internal LinkRank metric.
This one highlights the strength of your interlinking. With this metric, you can discover important pages that aren’t linked enough throughout the other pages. For example, one of our main pages is the one about the best VPNs in 2026 – we link to it a lot for this reason.
This important page also contains plentiful internal links to OTHER less important pages, giving them a substantial rank boost because of its good “status.”
10. Find the Missing Keywords & Backlinks
Keyword research tools are used to find keyword ideas and improve your optimization. If you’re using Semruh or SE Ranking, you’ll also find various backlink tools to amplify your backlink game and boost your ranking. Logically, an SEO audit of these aspects is vital.
Without proper keyword optimization, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Without lots of quality backlinks, you’re digging your grave deeper. We love using the Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap tools from Semrush, SE Ranking, and even Moz Pro.
We prefer the former two, as they’re intuitive and let you easily discover the keywords your competitors rank for but not your site. Conversely, the Backlink Gap tool lets you discover their backlinks that link to their websites but not yours.
Perform Competitive Analysis With SE Ranking
Next? Fill in the gap!
You can compare your domain to a few competitors and fetch this data in seconds. In the Keyword Gap tool, click on Missing in the table to find the keywords to focus on in your campaign.
In the Backlink Gap tool, you can use the Outreach function.
This one lets you get in touch with the site you want a backlink from and negotiate the terms. Such a clever function is unavailable in Ahrefs, Moz, SE Ranking, and other popular Semrush alternatives and rivals. Yet, it ideally complements our SEO audit checklist.
By having more ranking keywords and numerous quality backlinks, instead of digging your grave, you’re shooting for the stars. Keywords and backlinks are one of the, if not THE most important ranking metrics.
Get More Backlinks With Semrush
11. Check for Outdated Content (And Update It!)
SEO auditing tricks are in vain if you don’t “iron out” your outdated content. Outdated content is… well, useless and won’t attract more people because it’s… well, useless. But how to find outdated pages and update them? A great rank tracker tool can help tremendously.
In particular, Semrush’s Position Tracking can identify these pages by displaying those with declines in SERPs. When using Position Tracking, go to the Pages menu and examine your page’s estimated traffic and average position. You’ll see two numbers in each column.
One is the estimated traffic and average position on the given day and another is the difference between this and the last check. If the page has declined for seemingly unknown reasons, it’s time to examine it. We suggest:
- Reassessing the information on the page and making sure it’s actual
- Improving your internal linking by adding more links and/or removing dead links
- Going through your backlinks and removing those with low authority scores or, again, dead backlinks that lead nowhere
- Removing fluff from your content and focusing on delivering accurate information without unnecessary words and sentences
- Improving your readability through various infographics, tables, bullet points, and again, shorter, more comprehensive sentences
Conclusion
We can conclude by saying that comprehensive SEO auditing requires a bit of time and effort. With Semrush and SE Ranking as the top options, you have way less to worry about. These tools offer everything you need to inspect your website from head to toe.
By discovering issues and root causes of problems, you can evaluate your website properly and see where you stand. Positive changes imply your ranking will follow the same trend, while negative changes in ranking and a decline in organic traffic tell another story.
When thinking about how to perform an SEO audit, you should look at it from a monitoring perspective. Don’t rush and try to fix everything at once. Take a look from afar, examine your analyses, and approach each methodically. No site is perfect and all have some issues.
SEO audits surely help resolve them and set your website on a path to success.