A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework You Can Run This Week

The term "SEO audit" gets applied to everything from a five-minute tool scan to a multi-week technical review. For this guide, we're defining it precisely: an SEO audit is a structured diagnostic process that identifies why your site isn't ranking where it should — not just a list of errors to clear.

There's an important distinction here. A checklist tells you what to implement. A diagnostic tells you what's broken and why. This guide is the latter.

A complete SEO audit covers four diagnostic layers:

• Technical health — Can search engines crawl and index your site correctly? Are Core Web Vitals within acceptable ranges? Are there crawl traps, redirect chains, or canonicalization errors?
• On-page relevance — Do your pages clearly signal topical relevance to search engines? Are title tags, headers, and content aligned with actual search intent?
• Authority signals — Does your backlink profile support the rankings you're targeting? Are there toxic links suppressing trust?
• Content and keyword mapping — Does each page own a distinct search intent, or are multiple pages cannibalizing each other?

These layers have a dependency order. Technical issues block everything downstream. If Googlebot can't crawl a page, it doesn't matter how well-written the content is. Fix technical problems first, then assess on-page, then authority.

This sequencing is where most self-audits go wrong — they apply on-page fixes to pages that have indexation problems, then wonder why nothing changed after three months.

Start with Google Search Console. It's free, authoritative (it shows what Google actually sees), and surfaces the most critical issues first.

Coverage Report

Go to Index → Pages. You want to understand the ratio of indexed pages to submitted pages, and investigate any "Excluded" categories — especially "Crawled, currently not indexed" and "Discovered, currently not indexed." A large number of excluded pages often signals thin content, duplicate content, or crawl budget issues.

Core Web Vitals

Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. Pages flagged as "Poor" are at a measurable disadvantage in competitive SERPs. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are typically the most actionable for business sites.

Crawl Simulation

Run your site through Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs). Look for:

• Broken internal links (4xx responses)
• Redirect chains longer than two hops
• Missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
• Pages blocked by robots.txt that shouldn't be
• Canonicalization inconsistencies

Site Speed

Use Google PageSpeed Insights on your five highest-traffic pages and your homepage. A slow server response time (TTFB above 600ms) is usually a hosting or caching problem. Large uncompressed images are the most common culprit for poor LCP scores and are usually easy to fix.

Document every issue you find with its URL, error type, and priority. You'll need this list for the root-cause analysis in Layer Four.

Once you've confirmed the site is technically crawlable and indexed, assess whether each page is sending clear relevance signals.

Keyword-to-Page Mapping

Pull your top 20 pages by organic impressions from Search Console (Performance → Pages). For each page, identify the primary keyword Google is already associating with it (check the Queries tab for that page). Ask two questions:

• Is this the keyword I intended this page to rank for?
• Is there another page on my site targeting the same keyword?

If multiple pages share the same target keyword, you have keyword cannibalization — one of the most common causes of rankings that plateau just below the first page.

Title Tag and Header Review

Every page should have a unique title tag that leads with the primary keyword, stays under 60 characters, and describes what the page delivers. Headers (H1, H2) should reinforce the topic hierarchy — not be stuffed with variations, but clearly structured for a reader scanning the page.

Content Depth Assessment

Compare your top-ranking competitor pages for each target keyword. Are they covering subtopics your page ignores? Are they answering questions your page skips? A useful proxy: word count isn't the goal, but if your page is 400 words and every competitor ranking above you has 1,200+, content depth is likely a factor.

Internal Linking Gaps

Use Screaming Frog's "Inlinks" report to find pages with few or no internal links pointing to them. Pages that are hard to reach internally are harder for Google to prioritize. Important pages — your services pages, key landing pages — should have multiple internal links from contextually relevant content.

Your backlink profile is a trust signal. A strong profile accelerates rankings; a weak or toxic profile suppresses them regardless of how well everything else is executed.

Baseline Authority Assessment

Use Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to pull your domain's backlink profile. You're looking at three things:

• Total referring domains — How many unique sites link to you? Volume matters less than quality.
• Authority distribution — Are links coming from relevant, established sites, or from low-quality directories?
• Link velocity — Did your link acquisition drop off? A sudden loss of referring domains often correlates with ranking declines.

Competitor Gap Analysis

Run your top three competitors through the same tool. Compare their referring domain counts and quality to yours. If they have significantly more links from relevant industry sites, that gap is a likely contributor to ranking differences — and it tells you what kind of link-building activity is worth prioritizing.

Toxic Link Identification

Most backlink tools flag potentially harmful links. Look for patterns: links from sites with no topical relevance, links from sites that exist purely to sell links, or a sudden spike of links from foreign-language domains. A handful of low-quality links is normal and ignorable. A pattern of them warrants investigation and potentially a disavow file.

In our experience, most small and mid-size businesses don't have actively toxic profiles — they simply have thin profiles. The fix is acquiring quality links, not cleaning up bad ones. But it's worth checking before assuming you need an aggressive link-building campaign.

This is the step most self-audits skip, and it's where a diagnostic approach earns its value.

After running through the first three layers, you'll have a list of issues. The goal now is to identify which issues are root causes versus symptoms. Fixing symptoms without addressing root causes produces temporary improvements that don't compound.

Common Root Cause Patterns

• Rankings exist but don't convert: Usually a keyword-intent mismatch. The page ranks for informational queries but the page is designed for commercial intent (or vice versa).
• Rankings plateau just below page one: Often keyword cannibalization or insufficient authority for that specific keyword's competitive threshold.
• Rankings dropped after a site migration or redesign: Almost always a technical issue — broken redirects, changed URL structures, or removed pages that had backlinks.
• New pages never rank: Could be crawl budget problems, thin content, no internal linking, or a domain authority gap relative to competitors.
• Local rankings are inconsistent: Usually a Google Business Profile signal issue or NAP inconsistency across directories.

Prioritization Framework

Once you've identified root causes, prioritize fixes by two factors: impact (how many pages or queries does this affect?) and effort (how long will this take to implement?). High-impact, low-effort fixes — broken redirects, missing title tags, image compression — go first. Technical architecture changes go last, after you've confirmed the diagnosis warrants them.

Document your findings in a simple format: issue, root cause hypothesis, affected pages, priority tier, and owner. This becomes your SEO roadmap.

This guide gives you a solid diagnostic framework. Here's an honest assessment of where it has limits.

Self-Audit Is Sufficient When:

• Your site is under 200 pages and relatively new
• You have one or two clear technical issues flagged in Search Console
• You're in an early-stage market with low competition
• You have time to implement fixes yourself and can monitor results over 3-4 months

A Professional Audit Adds Value When:

• You've made changes and seen no improvement after 90+ days
• Rankings dropped sharply after a site update, migration, or algorithm update
• Your site has over 500 pages, multiple subdomains, or complex URL structures
• You're in a competitive market where top-ranking competitors have substantially stronger authority profiles
• You've run a self-audit, found issues, fixed them, and still can't identify why rankings aren't responding

A professional audit doesn't just run the same tools — it applies pattern recognition across many prior engagements, catches interconnected issues that don't surface in sequential self-review, and delivers a prioritized roadmap you can hand directly to a developer or content team.

If your audit surfaces more than a handful of issues across multiple layers, the interaction effects between those issues are often as important as the issues themselves — and those interactions are difficult to diagnose without experience across many site configurations.

If you're at that point, request a professional SEO audit from our team — we'll identify the root causes and give you a prioritized action plan, not just a list of errors.