The SEO Audit Checklist We Actually Use

The exact sequence we work through on every audit, in the order we do it and why that order matters.

Start with indexation

Before anything else, establish what Google has indexed versus what you think it has. Compare Search Console coverage against your sitemap and your actual page count. Discrepancies here explain more ranking problems than any other single check.

Common findings: thousands of parameter URLs indexed, important pages excluded by robots.txt, or paginated archives consuming crawl budget.

Then crawlability and architecture

Run a full crawl. Look for orphan pages, redirect chains, broken internal links, and pages more than three clicks from the homepage. Site architecture problems compound because they affect every page beneath them.

Then Core Web Vitals

Pull field data from Search Console rather than lab data from Lighthouse. Lab data tells you what could happen; field data tells you what is happening to real users. Prioritize by traffic-weighted impact.

Then on-page and content

Check for duplicate or missing titles and metas, heading hierarchy problems, keyword cannibalization, and thin pages. Cannibalization is the most commonly missed and most damaging.

Then backlinks and authority

Compare your link profile against the three sites currently outranking you for your priority terms. The gap tells you what you actually need rather than what a generic audit template suggests.

Finish with a prioritized roadmap

An audit that lists 200 problems without ranking them by impact and effort is a report, not a plan. Every finding should carry an estimated impact, an estimated effort, and an owner.