How to audit your own SEO — 40-point checklist

An SEO audit is a systematic check of everything that affects how search engines find, understand and rank your site. This 40-point checklist covers crawlability, indexation, on-page optimisation, content quality, backlink profile and technical health — with priority scoring so you fix the most damaging issues first.

Preparation

Before you begin, collect the baseline data you will compare against after making fixes. Export your Google Search Console performance data for the last 90 days — total clicks, impressions, average position and top queries. Export your Google Analytics traffic data for the same period. Take a PageSpeed Insights score for your three most important pages. Record this baseline. Without it, you cannot measure whether your audit led to improvement.

Install Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free version crawls up to 500 URLs) or use Sitebulb for a more visual crawl report. Connect Search Console to Screaming Frog so it imports index coverage data directly. These tools will surface most of the issues in the checklist automatically.

Crawl and index audit

These checks verify that search engines can find and index your pages. Issues here are the most damaging because they prevent your content from being discovered at all.

Address every critical item before moving on. A page that cannot be crawled or indexed cannot rank, regardless of how good the content is.

On-page audit

On-page checks verify that each page is optimised for its target query and follows search engine guidelines for structured content.

Each page should have exactly one H1 that contains the primary keyword or a close variant. Title tags should be 50 to 60 characters, unique across the site, and place the primary keyword near the beginning. Meta descriptions should be 140 to 158 characters and earn the click rather than just summarising the page.

Check for keyword cannibalisation — multiple pages targeting the same keyword. Use Search Console to identify pages that compete for the same queries, then consolidate or redirect them. Check header hierarchy: H1 followed by H2, then H3, never skipping levels. Ensure every image has descriptive alt text. Check that internal links use descriptive anchor text and point to relevant pages.

Content audit

Content quality is the hardest dimension to audit algorithmically, but the most important for long-term ranking. Review each content cluster for completeness. Does the pillar page exist for each broad topic? Does it link to detail pages on relevant subtopics? Are any important questions unanswered?

Check for thin content — pages under 300 words that serve no clear purpose. Thin pages waste crawl budget and dilute site-wide quality signals. Either expand them to at least 800 words with genuine value or remove and redirect them.

Review freshness. Pages with a 2023 or earlier date in the URL or visible on the page look stale. Update the content or add a significant new section and update the date. Check that every statistic has a working outbound link to its source. Broken source links on statistics pages damage credibility with both readers and search engines.

Backlink audit

Export your backlink profile from Ahrefs, Semrush or Search Console. Look for patterns that indicate a problem. A sudden spike in links from unrelated sites, especially with identical anchor text, may signal a negative SEO attack. Links from link farms, PBNs or sites that Google has deindexed should be disavowed.

Calculate your domain-level link authority trend. Is your total referring domain count growing month over month? If it is flat or declining, your site is not earning new natural links, which means competitors are gaining relative authority. The fix is not buying links — it is publishing content worth linking to, such as original data, useful tools or deep guides.

Check which pages have the most backlinks. If your most-linked page is a tag archive or a thin blog post rather than a commercial page, look for ways to channel that link equity toward your important pages.

Technical audit

Technical checks cover page speed, mobile usability, structured data and security. Run PageSpeed Insights on your three most-visited pages. LCP should be under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1. If any metric fails, the tool shows specific recommendations — compress images, remove render-blocking resources, reduce server response time.

Check mobile usability in Search Console. Any page with a mobile usability error is losing traffic from mobile searches, which now make up the majority of searches globally. The most common mobile issues are text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, and content wider than the screen.

Validate your structured data. Run three to five representative pages through Google's Rich Results Test. Common errors: missing required fields, incorrect date formatting, and FAQ markup where the answer text is not visible on the page.

Check that HTTPS is enforced site-wide with a valid certificate, no mixed-content warnings in the browser console, and all internal links using HTTPS.

Priority action plan

A 40-point checklist produces a long list, and not everything needs fixing immediately. Group your findings into three tiers based on impact and effort.

Tier 1 — Fix this week. Issues that block indexation or cause a poor user experience: pages returning errors, noindex on important pages, broken sitemaps, critical Core Web Vitals failures, mobile usability errors. These directly prevent traffic and rankings.

Tier 2 — Fix this month. Issues that weaken performance: missing or duplicate meta tags, keyword cannibalisation, thin content, slow pages that are not yet failing Core Web Vitals, missing or broken internal links.

Tier 3 — Fix this quarter. Issues that improve quality over time: expanding thin content, building topic clusters, improving backlink profile, updating stale content, implementing structured data on more pages.

Re-audit quarterly. SEO changes constantly, and a site that passes audit in one quarter may have critical issues in the next due to algorithm updates, site changes or link profile shifts.