How to run an SEO audit on your website

Carrying out an SEO audit will not only show you how your site is ranking, it will also highlight any issues that could prevent good rankings — helping you develop a stronger SEO strategy. This guide outlines the key steps.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is a health check of your website. It looks at how well your site is set up to appear in search engine results, and identifies anything that might be holding you back. This covers three main areas: technical foundations, on-page content, and the quality of links pointing to your site from other websites.

Most businesses benefit from running an SEO audit at least once a year. If your site changes frequently or operates in a competitive market, auditing quarterly will help you stay on top of issues as they arise.

Tools you’ll need

To run a proper SEO audit, you’ll need to use a few online tools. These let you analyse how your site is performing in search results and identify any issues affecting your rankings.

Professional SEO tools crawl your site in a similar way to search engine spiders, and flag issues and opportunities. Many offer free trials. Popular options include:

• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• MOZ

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows you how Google is indexing your site, alerts you to crawl issues, and provides data on the search queries bringing visitors to your pages. You’ll need to verify your website to use it.

Google Analytics gives you data on how much traffic is coming to your site via search engines and which pages are your top SEO landing pages.

Carry out keyword research and set your SEO goals

Before you audit your site, you need to know what you want to rank for. Use your SEO tool’s keyword research feature to look up the terms your customers are likely searching for. This will show you the monthly search volume for each term and how competitive it is to rank for.

When selecting keywords, keep these principles in mind:

• Only target keywords that are relevant to your business and your customers — you’ll need to commit to optimising your content around them.
• Look for a good balance between search volume and competition. Very popular terms are harder to rank for; very niche ones may not drive enough traffic.
• Consider “long tail” keywords — longer, more specific phrases that tend to have lower search volume but higher conversion rates and less competition.
• Think about your sales funnel. People use different search terms depending on whether they’re researching, comparing, or ready to buy.

Plot your existing rankings

Now that you know what you want to rank for, find out where you currently stand. Using your SEO tool alongside Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you should be able to answer:

• Which keywords do you rank for, and in what position? Your SEO tool will show you this. It may also surface keywords you hadn’t thought of.
• Where do you rank for your target keywords? This helps you see how much work is needed for each term.
• How much traffic do your ranked keywords drive? Check Search Console for clicks and impressions, then Google Analytics to see which pages users land on.

Identify any critical site issues

Run an SEO audit (sometimes called a site crawl) in your professional SEO tool. The tool will flag issues and grade them by severity. The most important things to address are issues that could be preventing search engines from finding or indexing your pages altogether.

Key issues to look out for include:

• Crawler blocks: Pages can be accidentally blocked from appearing in search results via noindex tags or robots.txt entries — sometimes carried over from a development version of the site. An audit will flag any of these so you can remove them if they’re there by mistake.
• HTTP error codes: 4xx errors (like “404 page not found”) mean a page can’t be reached. 5xx errors indicate a server problem. A high number of 404 errors may mean you’ve moved or deleted content without setting up proper redirects.
• Broken internal links: Links on your site that point to pages that no longer exist create a poor experience for users and can negatively impact your rankings.
• Duplicate content: When the same content appears on multiple URLs — for example, both http and https versions of your site being live simultaneously — search engines can struggle to decide which to rank. This can dilute your ranking potential.

Identify other on-site issues

Once critical issues are dealt with, your audit will also surface other on-page factors that could be limiting your rankings. These include:

• Slow page load times: Page speed is a ranking factor, and slow pages lead to higher bounce rates. Use Google PageSpeed Insights for a detailed breakdown of what’s causing delays.
• Thin content: Pages with little or no meaningful content can drag down how Google perceives your site’s overall quality. If these pages shouldn’t exist, remove them. If they’re genuine pages, consider expanding the content.
• Page title tag issues: Title tags help search engines understand what a page is about and appear as the headline in search results. Common problems include missing titles, duplicate titles, and titles that are too long or too short.
• Meta description issues: Meta descriptions appear as the snippet beneath your title in search results. Missing or duplicate descriptions are a missed opportunity to encourage clicks.
• Heading tag issues: Every page should have a single H1 heading that reflects the page’s main topic and includes your primary keyword. Use H2 and H3 tags to structure the rest of your content.

Assess your inbound links

The number and quality of other websites linking to yours is one of the most significant ranking factors search engines use. It’s very difficult to rank well for competitive search terms without quality inbound links.

Use the link audit tool within your SEO platform to assess:

• Link volume: How many links are coming to your site, and from how many different domains?
• Link quality: Are the sites linking to you credible and relevant? Links from spammy or low-quality sites can actually harm your rankings. Look at the domain authority and spam score of your linking domains.
• 404s: Are any of your inbound links landing on pages that no longer exist? This wastes the SEO value those links carry and gives visitors a poor experience.

At the end of your audit, you should have a clear picture of any critical issues that need immediate attention, as well as a longer list of improvements to work through over time. The next step is to use these findings to build your SEO strategy — fixing problems, optimising your content for your target keywords, and developing a plan to earn high-quality inbound links.