A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Software Company Websites

This guide is written for software companies — SaaS products, developer tools, B2B platforms, and infrastructure providers — that have an existing website and want to understand why organic traffic isn't growing or converting at the rate it should.

It's not a general SEO checklist. Software company websites have structural characteristics that make them different from service business or e-commerce sites:

• Heavy use of JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Next.js) that affect how Googlebot crawls and renders pages
• Separate documentation sites or subdomains that need their own indexation strategy
• Product and feature pages that must rank for high-intent B2B queries, not just brand terms
• Long buying cycles where content must serve multiple buyer stage [software company seo faq](/resources/software-company/software-company-seo-faq)s — awareness, evaluation, and decision

If your site is pre-launch or you have fewer than 20 indexed pages, this audit will surface fewer findings. The framework is most useful for sites that have been live for at least six months and have some existing content structure to evaluate.

You can work through this audit internally using the tools listed later in this guide, or use it as a briefing document when engaging an SEO team. Either way, the output is the same: a prioritized list of issues ranked by their likely impact on rankings and qualified traffic.

This is where most software company audits need to start. If Google can't reliably render your pages, every other optimization you make is built on unstable ground.

JavaScript frameworks like React and Next.js can produce sites that look fully functional in a browser but return near-empty HTML to a crawler. Google does render JavaScript, but there's a documented delay between when a URL is first crawled and when its rendered version is processed — and some pages never get fully rendered at all.

What to check

• Raw HTML vs. rendered HTML comparison: Use Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool to fetch a page as Googlebot. Compare what you see in the rendered screenshot against your live page. Missing navigation, hidden product descriptions, or absent CTA copy are red flags.
• Core page content delivery: For your highest-priority product and feature pages, confirm that the primary H1, meta description, and body copy are present in the raw HTML — not injected after page load.
• Internal link visibility: Run a rendered crawl using a tool like Screaming Frog (with JavaScript rendering enabled) or Sitebulb. Compare the internal link count in raw vs. rendered mode. Large discrepancies mean Google may not be discovering pages through internal links as you expect.
• Soft 404s on dynamic routes: SaaS platforms often have user-generated or dynamically generated URLs that return a 200 status with thin or empty content. These dilute crawl budget and can suppress your stronger pages.

In our experience working with software companies, JavaScript crawlability issues are the single most common root cause of indexation problems — and they're often invisible until you do a rendered comparison explicitly.

Documentation sites are an underutilized SEO asset for software companies. When configured correctly, they capture a significant share of developer and power-user queries at the bottom of the funnel — searches like "how to connect [your product] to [integration]" or "[your product] API rate limits."

When configured incorrectly, they either flood your index with thin auto-generated content or block genuinely useful pages that should rank.

Common documentation site problems

• Blanket noindex on docs subdomain: Many teams add a noindex directive during development and never remove it after launch. Check docs.yourproduct.com or yourproduct.com/docs in Google Search Console for coverage errors.
• Auto-generated pages without differentiated content: Version-specific docs pages, auto-generated API reference pages, and stub pages with one paragraph of content often create thousands of low-value URLs. These need either consolidation, noindex, or content expansion.
• Duplicate content across versions: If your docs site maintains multiple product versions, identical or near-identical content across version URLs creates a canonical signal problem. Choose a preferred version or use canonical tags to consolidate authority.
• Missing internal links from the main site to docs: If your main site doesn't link to high-value documentation articles, those pages accumulate no internal link equity. A deliberate internal linking structure between your blog, feature pages, and docs creates a stronger topical authority signal.

The audit question to answer here is: which documentation pages are indexed, which should be, and which shouldn't be? Build a simple spreadsheet categorizing each major docs section into one of those three buckets before deciding on remediation steps.

Product and feature pages are where conversions happen — but they're frequently the weakest SEO layer on a software company's site. The typical failure mode is that these pages are written for the visitor who already knows what your product does, not for the searcher who is comparing options or evaluating a specific capability.

Audit checklist for product and feature pages

• Keyword-to-page mapping: For each core feature, does a dedicated page exist? Or are multiple features consolidated onto one page with no clear keyword focus? Many software sites under-segment their feature pages relative to how buyers actually search.
• Title tag and meta description uniqueness: Run a crawl and check for duplicate or templated title tags across feature pages. "[Product Name] — Features" repeated across ten pages sends no differentiated signal to Google.
• Thin content threshold: Pages with fewer than 300 words of unique body copy rarely rank for competitive terms. Audit word count per page and flag anything below that threshold for expansion.
• Structured data gaps: SaaS product pages can benefit from SoftwareApplication schema. Check whether any structured markup is implemented and whether it's valid using Google's Rich Results Test.
• Pricing page indexation: Some teams block pricing pages from indexation intentionally. If yours is blocked, confirm this is a deliberate decision — pricing pages often rank for high-intent comparison queries and can drive qualified traffic.

After this layer, you should have a clear list of pages that need to be created, pages that need to be expanded, and pages where the keyword targeting needs to be revised. That list becomes the content roadmap that comes out of the audit.

Traffic metrics alone don't tell you whether your content is attracting the right buyers. A software company blog can generate thousands of monthly visits from developers who will never purchase — while completely missing the VP of Operations who is actively evaluating your product category.

[agency-led content gap analysis](/resources/software-company/software-company-seo-agency-vs-inhouse) for B2B software companies requires mapping your existing content against buyer stage and persona, not just keyword volume.

How to run the gap analysis

1. Map your ICP's search journey: Identify the 10-15 queries your ideal customer profile (ICP) makes at each stage — problem-aware, solution-aware, and product-aware. These become your target keyword set.
2. Audit existing content against that map: Which of those queries do you currently have a page targeting? Which are missing entirely? Which have a page but the content doesn't match the buyer's intent at that stage?
3. Competitive gap check: Use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to identify keywords where direct competitors rank in positions 1-10 and you have no indexed page. These represent addressable gaps where content already has demonstrated demand.
4. Bottom-of-funnel gap priority: For B2B software, pages targeting comparison queries ("[your product] vs. [competitor]"), use-case pages ("[your product] for [specific industry]"), and integration pages ("[your product] + [tool]") often convert at significantly higher rates than top-of-funnel content. Audit whether these pages exist and whether they rank.

The output of this layer is a prioritized content brief list, ordered by estimated commercial impact rather than traffic volume. High-volume informational keywords matter less to pipeline than lower-volume queries made by buyers who are close to a decision.

Once you've worked through all four layers, you need a way to prioritize findings. Not every issue deserves immediate attention. Use this simple scoring approach to triage:

Severity tiers

• Tier 1 — Blocking issues: Problems that prevent pages from being indexed or rendered correctly. Examples: noindex on high-priority pages, JavaScript rendering failures on product pages, crawl blocks via robots.txt. Fix these first — nothing else matters until indexation works.
• Tier 2 — Suppression issues: Pages are indexed but signals are weak. Examples: duplicate title tags, thin content, missing internal links, no structured data. These suppress rankings on pages that should perform better.
• Tier 3 — Gap issues: Content or pages that don't exist yet. Examples: missing feature pages, no comparison content, underdeveloped use-case pages. These are important but require new work rather than fixing existing problems.

Document your findings in a shared spreadsheet with columns for: issue type, affected URL or URL pattern, severity tier, estimated effort to fix (low/medium/high), and assigned owner. This format makes the audit actionable across engineering, content, and marketing teams — because software company SEO issues rarely sit with one team alone.

A full audit of a mid-size SaaS site typically surfaces 20-50 distinct findings. Attempting to address all of them simultaneously rarely works. A realistic 90-day remediation plan focuses on all Tier 1 issues, the highest-impact Tier 2 issues, and a limited number of high-priority Tier 3 content gaps.

If your internal team lacks the bandwidth or technical depth to work through this framework, it may be time to bring in outside help — not to hand over ownership, but to accelerate the diagnostic and remediation process with someone who has done it before on similar sites.