SEO audit

What it is

An SEO audit, sometimes called a technical SEO audit or site audit, is a diagnostic exercise rather than a strategy document. It typically covers crawling and indexing, site architecture, page speed and rendering, on-page elements, structured data, internal linking, content quality and duplication, and the external link profile. The output is a findings report with evidence, severity and recommended actions.

Why it matters

Audits matter because visibility problems are often caused by mechanics rather than by a lack of content: pages that cannot be crawled, rendered or understood will not be retrieved or cited. A good audit stops teams from spending budget on new content while basic barriers remain in place. It also creates a shared, evidence-based view of priorities across marketing, product and engineering.

How it works

Practitioners combine a crawl of the site with data from Search Console, analytics, log files and manual inspection of key templates, then compare findings against how important pages actually perform. Issues are grouped by theme and ranked by expected impact and effort, so the report becomes a backlog rather than a long undifferentiated list. Findings are usually re-checked after implementation to confirm the fix worked.

When it applies

Run an audit before a redesign or migration, when organic traffic or AI citations drop without an obvious cause, when taking over an unfamiliar site, and on a regular cycle for large or fast-changing sites.

Examples

• A crawl finds faceted navigation generating thousands of near-duplicate URLs, so canonical and crawl rules are added.
• Search Console shows key service pages marked as discovered but not indexed, tracing back to thin content and no internal links.
• A JavaScript-rendered pricing table is invisible in the raw HTML, so the content is server-rendered to make it available to crawlers and AI retrievers.

How it is measured

• Number of open issues by severity, and the proportion closed after each sprint
• Indexed pages versus intended indexable pages, tracked in Search Console
• Core Web Vitals and crawl error trends before and after fixes
• Organic impressions, clicks and AI citations for the templates and page groups the audit targeted