How to Do an SEO Audit: 8 Steps for Small Sites

An SEO audit is simply a comprehensive examination of the technical condition of your site, each page, your content, and your authority – to determine what is working for you when it comes to appearing in search and what is not. If you’ve been looking for a way to conduct an SEO audit without spending a fortune on software, then here are eight steps to do it without using any expensive tools.

It is written for business owners, marketers, and site managers who don’t specialize in SEO. How much time this DIY audit will take depends on the size of your blog or online business. On a small brochure site, it can take an afternoon; on a larger blog or online business, it can take a few working days. You’ll be examining your traffic, crawling, structure, speed, on-page details, content, links, and competition, and then you’ll have a prioritized plan. The last part is most important because a long list of problems that no one takes action on is just a spreadsheet.

Sites change constantly. Pages are added, plugins are updated, and old posts go stale without being noticed, so it’s more economical to check on a regular basis than to discover an issue once popularity declines. There is an optional downloadable printable SEO audit checklist you can use in conjunction with this guide. There is no need to deal with it if you’d prefer someone who is knowledgeable about it does it for you.

What Is an SEO Audit, and What Will It Tell You?

An SEO audit is a health check for your website. You look at how easily search engines can find and read your pages, how well each page is set up, how useful your content is, and how much trust other sites place in you. The result is a list of problems and opportunities, ranked by what’s worth fixing first.

What an SEO audit checks

Most audits cover four areas.

• Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes setup that lets search engines reach, read, and load your site: crawling, indexing, site structure, mobile layout, and speed.
• On-page SEO covers what’s on each page: the title, headings, text, images, and URLs, and how clearly they show what the page is about.
• Content means a content audit, where you review the pages you’ve published and decide which to keep, improve, merge, or remove.
• Off-page signals mostly mean backlinks, which are links from other websites to yours. Search engines treat good ones as a sign that others find your site worth recommending.

How an audit differs from ongoing SEO

Think of the audit as the diagnosis and ongoing SEO as the treatment. The audit tells you what’s wrong and what to do first. The treatment is the work of fixing it, publishing new content, and building your reputation over months. You can run an audit without committing to a long SEO program, and the findings are useful either way.

When it’s worth running an audit

The common triggers are a traffic drop, a redesign or site migration, a brand-new site you want to start on the right foot, growth that has stalled, or a routine yearly check. How often you need one depends on the size of your site and how often it changes, so treat any fixed schedule as a rough guide rather than a rule.

How to Do an SEO Audit: What You Need Before You Start

Good news first: a solid audit is possible with free tools. Paid software saves time on bigger sites, but it isn’t required to find the problems that matter most.

Free tools to start with

• Google Search Console shows how Google sees your site: which pages are indexed, what people searched for before clicking, and whether there are errors or penalties.
• Google Analytics 4 (GA4) shows what visitors do once they arrive, including which pages bring traffic and which lead to enquiries or sales.
• PageSpeed Insights tests how fast a page loads and how it behaves for real visitors, and suggests fixes.
• Bing Webmaster Tools is Search Console’s counterpart for Bing. It’s quick to set up, and sometimes flags issues Google’s tools don’t.

Crawlers and paid suites (optional)

A site crawler is software that visits your pages the way a search engine would and lists what it finds: broken links, missing titles, redirects, and so on. Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Semrush, and Ahrefs all offer one. A paid tool tends to be worth it once your site has hundreds or thousands of pages, because checking those by hand isn’t realistic. For a small site, the free tools above plus a free crawl limit will usually do.

Set your goal and baseline.

Before you change anything, decide what success looks like for you: more leads, more sales, or simply more visibility. Then record your baseline, meaning your current organic traffic, conversions, and top-performing pages. Screenshots or a simple spreadsheet are fine. Without a baseline, you can’t tell later whether your fixes did anything.

How deep should your audit go?

The right depth depends on what kind of site you run.

• Small brochure site (a handful of pages): Focus on Steps 1, 2, 4, and 5. Make sure the key pages are indexed, load quickly on phones, and have clear titles. Backlinks and competitor work can wait.
• Content-heavy site or blog: Add Step 6 in full. Old, overlapping, and thin posts are usually where the biggest gains and the biggest messes hide.
• E-commerce store: Pay extra attention to Step 2 and Step 4. Filtered category URLs, duplicate product pages, and heavy product images cause most of the trouble here.

Step 1: Review Your Organic Traffic and Rankings

Begin with what is occurring. Organic traffic is the number of visitors who find your site through a search engine that is not paid for. In GA4, filter your Acquisition report by Organic Search and a date range to the last 12-16 months for comparison to the same season from the previous year.

Open Search Console’s performance report. Clicks = Google visits, and impressions = the number of times your pages showed up in Google search results – without anybody clicking on them. When impressions are consistent, but clicks are dropping, it can be an indicator that the listings are not as appealing as they once were. When both go down, there might be something more serious going on.

Watch for sudden decreases or gradual decreases, and correlate them with dates: Site change, plugin update, site migration, or a known Google update. Last but not least, review conversions, which are the behaviors you’re interested in, such as form submissions, calls, or purchases. Non-converting traffic is a story different from converting traffic.

You’re looking for patterns, not perfect numbers. It is not unusual for data obtained from various tools to not always match exactly.

Step 2: Check That Google Can Crawl and Index Your Pages

Two ideas sit behind everything in this step. Crawling is when Google’s bots visit your pages and follow links. Indexing is when Google stores a page so it can appear in search results. A page can be crawled but not indexed, and a page that isn’t indexed can’t bring in search traffic, however good it is.

Crawlability: robots.txt, sitemap and blocked pages

Crawlability is the ease with which search engines can access your pages. Begin with your robots.txt file, a tiny text file located at yourdomain.com/robots.txt, which you can use to tell your bots to avoid certain pages. Chances are greater that a “disallow” rule is accidentally blocking entire sections, as is sometimes the case after redesigns.

Then review your XML sitemap – a file that provides a list of the pages you wish to be included in the search engines. It should contain your significant, indexable pages and not include redirected, broken, or intentionally hidden pages. If you haven’t submitted it already, submit it in Search Console.

Indexing: which pages Google has (and hasn’t) indexed

In Search Console, open the Pages report under Indexing. It shows which pages are indexed and gives a reason for each one that isn’t. You can also type site:yourdomain.com into Google for a rough look at what’s indexed, though Search Console is more reliable.

A few common messages, in plain English:

• Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag: The page carries an instruction telling Google not to index it. That’s fine for a thank-you page and a disaster for a service page.
• Crawled, currently not indexed: Google visited but chose not to include the page, often because it looked thin or very similar to another page.
• Discovered, currently not indexed: Google knows the URL exists but hasn’t gotten around to crawling it yet.
• Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical: You’ve got near-identical pages, and Google picked a different one than you did.

Duplicate site versions and canonicals

Your site can accidentally exist in several versions: http and https, with and without www, with and without a trailing slash. If all of them load, Google may see them as separate copies of the same site. The fix is to pick one version and send the others to it with redirects. A redirect automatically forwards visitors and search engines from one URL to another.

A canonical tag is a line of code on a page that says which URL is the preferred version when similar pages exist. Check that your important pages point to themselves as canonical and that no page points to the wrong place.

Penalties and manual actions

A manual action is a punishment set by a human reviewer at Google for a site that violates their spam policies. Go to the “Security and manual actions” section in Search Console. On most sites, you’ll find a notification that reads “There are no matching sites. You will find most sites with a message saying there are none. If one is detected, read the information, correct the problem it identifies (or explain why it cannot be corrected), and request a reconsideration.

Platform tip. In WordPress, go to Settings, Reading, and select the discourage search engines from indexing settings. It’s sometimes left switched on after development. Be sure that any staging or test version of the site is not indexed. For ecommerce sites, filtered and faceted URLs (such as a category page with a price filter and color filter) can generate thousands of near-duplicate pages. Shopify may display the same product in two or more URL paths, for example in a collection. Typically, that should be done with canonical tags, but just double-check.

What this translates into in reality. You have a primary service page that is not receiving traffic. In the Pages report of Search Console, you check the URL, and you come across a message saying “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag. You make a mistake while reviewing page settings and end up ticking an SEO plugin. You uncheck it, go to Search Console, and request indexing after a couple of days to see if the page is now indexed.

Step 3: Audit Your Site Structure, Internal Links and Broken Links

Site structure refers to the organization and linking of your site’s pages. Structure can make your site easy to navigate and can assist search engines in determining the most important pages on your site. The important pages should not be too far from the home page, and your navigation should be comprehensible to a first-time visitor to your site.

Internal links are links that connect one page of your website with another. They circulate attention around your site and indicate how pages are associated. An orphan page is a page that does not have any links from other pages in the site leading to it. Crawlers may have difficulty finding orphans, and users cannot access them from the Web unless they use a direct URL. They will be included in your crawler’s report, or you can compare them to your sitemap and those that have links.

Next, check for broken links – links that lead to a page that no longer exists. Typically, they appear in the browser as 404 errors—or “page not found” messages. There’s a need to fix both internal and external broken links. Update the link to the appropriate page, delete it, or configure a redirect from the old link to the new one most closely linked.

As you are in the redirect report, look for chains: a URL that redirects to another redirecting URL. Every hop slows you down and uses your crawling energy. Record the first URL directly to the last destination.

Step 4: Test Mobile Usability, Page Speed and Core Web Vitals

Page experience matters to your visitors first. Nobody enjoys waiting for a slow page or pinching a tiny menu on their phone. Search engines care about it too, though it’s usually one factor among many rather than a magic lever.

Mobile usability

Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing, so a mobile-friendly site isn’t optional. Open your key pages on a real phone and look for text that’s too small to read, buttons too close together to tap, and content that spills off the screen. Anything missing on mobile may be missing from Google’s view of your page too.

Page speed and Core Web Vitals

Page speed is how quickly your page loads and becomes usable. Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to describe that experience:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is how long the biggest visible element, often a hero image or headline, takes to appear.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) is how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is how much the layout jumps around while loading, like when a button moves just as you try to tap it.

Run the mentioned pages through PageSpeed Insights. It provides real-world information from site visitors when sufficient is available, laboratory test results, and particular tips. Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report groups your pages into good, needs improvement, and poor. Google’s current pass thresholds are announced in their official document, not in ‘old articles’.

It’s also the perfect time to perform a fast technical SEO audit of your top 10 pages, including speed, mobile layout, and crawl errors.

Common quick wins

• Compress and resize oversized images, and use modern formats where your platform supports them.
• Turn on caching so repeat visitors don’t reload everything from scratch.
• Remove scripts, widgets, and plugins you no longer use.

If you don’t feel like making the necessary changes, a developer can make them for you. This is a process that our website design and development team or WordPress development team takes care of.

Platform tip. The common issues are plugin bloat, using heavy themes, and lack of caching on WordPress. On Shopify, check apps that inject scripts on all pages, and large theme and product images. Product photo weight and third-party widgets like chat, reviews, and pop-ups are the first things to look at for online stores in general.

In practice, this means: Your homepage has a large hero image, and it’s taking too much time to load. Your homepage contains a large hero image, which is taking too long to load the main content. Resize and compress the picture, upload the lighter version, and repeat the test again to check if the warning message disappears.

Step 5: Check On-Page SEO Page by Page

On-page work is done one page at a time, so don’t try to polish the whole site at once. Start with your most important pages: the homepage, main services or product categories, and the posts that already bring traffic.

Before editing anything, think about search intent, which is the reason behind a search, or what the person typing it actually wants. Someone searching “how to fix a leaking tap” wants instructions, not a sales page. A page that matches intent has a far better chance of being useful, and usefulness is what you’re aiming for.

Titles, meta descriptions and headings

The title tag is the clickable headline in search results, and the meta description is the summary beneath it. Each page should have its own, written for people first. Keep titles short enough that they aren’t cut off in results, and avoid cramming in keywords. Headings (H1, H2, H3 and so on) give the page an outline. Each page should have one clear H1, with subheadings that follow the structure of the content.

URLs, images and alt text

A good URL is short, readable, and describes the page, like /seo-services/ rather than /page?id=4872. For images, check file size first, because large files slow pages down. Then check the alt text, a short written description of the image used by screen readers and shown when an image fails to load. Describe what’s in the picture plainly. It helps accessibility, and it helps search engines understand the image.

Structured data (schema)

Schema markup is the code that is inserted into a page to identify objects such as products, reviews, events, FAQs, your business, etc., that search engines can recognize. It can make a page eligible for richer results, though it doesn’t guarantee them. After adding it, check it with Google’s Rich Results Test.

Platform tip. Titles and meta descriptions for WordPress are typically changed using an SEO plugin, in a box below the page editor. On Shopify, they feature in the page and product settings and the theme. For stores, ensure product pages include product schema as well as review schema (if there are true reviews).

How this is practiced on the ground. A plumbing company’s page has no meta description and the title is “Home”, so Google fills in a meta description from random text on the page. You then rewrite the title to a variation such as ‘Emergency Plumber in Leeds | 24 Hour Callouts | Smith Plumbing’ and write a description that tells people what the services are, where they are located, and why there is a need to click. You make a note of the date so you can compare clicks later. Rewritten to improve clarity of the listing. It doesn’t guarantee a ranking improvement.

Step 6: Evaluate Content Quality, Gaps and Cannibalization

Content problems are often the hardest to spot and the most rewarding to fix. Pull a list of your pages from your crawler or your CMS, along with their traffic from Search Console, and go through them honestly.

Is your content helpful and up to date?

Look for three kinds of weak pages. Thin content is a page with too little substance to answer the question it’s meant to answer. Duplicate content is text that appears, in whole or in large part, on more than one page of your site or elsewhere. Outdated content is anything with old prices, expired offers, or advice that no longer holds.

A simple rule helps you decide what to do with each:

• Keep pages that perform well and are still accurate.
• Update pages that have potential but are stale or thin.
• Merge pages that cover the same ground into one stronger page.
• Remove pages with no traffic, no links, and no purpose, redirecting them if a relevant replacement exists.

If you need help rewriting or expanding pages, our web content writing service can take that on.

Find content gaps

A content gap is a topic or question your audience searches for that your site doesn’t cover well. To find them, compare your pages against what competitors cover, and scan your Search Console queries for searches where you appear but don’t have a page that properly answers the question. Questions your customers ask you by phone or email are also a good source.

Keyword cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization happens when two or more of your pages compete for the same search. Instead of one strong page, you get two weaker ones, and Google may swap between them. To spot it, search your target phrase in Search Console’s performance report and look at which pages appear for it. If several do, you can merge them into one, differentiate them so each targets a distinct angle, or redirect the weaker one to the stronger.

What this looks like in practice. You find two blog posts, “How often should you service a boiler?” and “Boiler service frequency explained.” Both get a few impressions for the same queries, and neither ranks well. You pick the one with more links and more traffic as the main page, fold the best parts of the other into it, set up a redirect from the retired URL, and update your internal links to point at the survivor.

Step 7: Review Your Backlinks and Brand Mentions

Keep this step focused. An audit checks the state of your backlinks. Building new ones is a separate project.

Backlink profile health

Your backlink profile is all links that link to your site. Go to Open Search Console’s Links report or use a backlink tool to view the number of referring domains, which are the unique websites linking to you. A hundred links from one site don’t tell as much as ten links from ten relevant sites. Consider relevance, also: Are there websites that reach you links with your area or your industry?

Beware of links that show up on websites that have nothing to do with the information you’re looking for, or websites that are of poor quality or appear to be automated. There are a few odd ones that are fine on any site and not a cause for concern. Google’s tools to ignore links, known as disavow, are a cold tool to use that works for serious and intentional link spam and most sites should never have to use.

Unlinked mentions and lost links

Unlinked brand mentions are places where someone has written about your business without linking to it. They’re easy opportunities, since a friendly request to add a link often works. Also check for lost links, where a site that used to link to you has removed the link or the page has changed address. Our upcoming link building article covers how to go about winning links. For the audit, just note what you find.

Step 8: Compare Yourself With Competitors, SERP Features and AI Answers

Benchmark against the sites that actually outrank you

Your search competitors are the sites that appear for the searches you care about, and they aren’t always your business competitors. A local bakery might compete in search with recipe blogs and national chains. Search your main phrases and note who keeps showing up. Then compare their topics, how deep their content goes, and how well established they look against your own. The goal is to understand what Google seems to reward for those searches, not to copy anyone.

Check SERP features and AI-generated answers.

On a search results page, SERP features include anything that isn’t a blue link. There are other features as well, with the most prominent being a featured snippet (the answer box that is highlighted at the top), local packs, and image carousels. Look for your main phrases and view what features are found and if there is any of your pages that are showing up in them.

For some searches, you’ll also be able to find AI answers, AI-generated summaries that appear above or alongside typical search results. This is a rapidly developing area, so stick to practical approaches. Record which of your core queries are answered with AI and where it is getting the information from, as well as whether your content is clear, accurate, well-structured, and therefore suitable for AI. Consider checking back from time to time, not wholesale reform your strategy.

How to Turn Your SEO Audit Into a Prioritized Action Plan

This is the part that decides whether the audit changes anything. By now you’ll have a long list of findings, and trying to fix everything at once usually means nothing gets finished. Your audit report, the document recording what you found and what you’ll do about it, is how you avoid that.

Sort issues by impact and effort

Prioritization means ranking each finding by how much it could help and how hard it is to fix. Impact versus effort is the simplest way to do it:

Here’s a worked example with three findings:

1. Service page accidentally set to noindex. The impact is high because the page can’t appear in search at all, and the effort is low because it’s a settings change. This is a quick win and goes to the top.
2. Two overlapping blog posts. The impact is moderate, and the effort is moderate, since it means merging text and setting up a redirect. This goes in the next batch.
3. Slightly long meta descriptions on old posts. The impact is low, and the effort is low. Fix them when you’re editing those pages anyway.

Assign owners, resources, and a timeline.

Every fix needs a person. Technical items like redirects, speed, and crawl settings usually go to a developer. Page copy, content updates, and merges go to a writer. Link outreach and reporting often sit with a marketer. Then sequence the work in blocks. In the first 30 days, take the quick wins and anything blocking indexing. Days 30 to 60 suit the medium-sized projects such as content merges and speed work. Days 60 to 90 are for the bigger structural jobs and for re-checking what you’ve done. Adjust the blocks to your team’s real capacity.

Build a simple audit report.

You don’t need anything fancy. A spreadsheet with these columns works well as a working SEO audit checklist you can come back to:

If you’d like a ready-made version, there’s an optional downloadable template to go with this guide.

Re-measure after fixes

Go back to the baseline you recorded earlier. Track organic traffic, clicks, impressions, conversions, and the status of the pages you fixed. Give changes time to be crawled and processed before judging them, and re-check on a regular schedule. SEO changes don’t have a fixed timeline, and results differ from site to site, so no one can promise how fast or how much things will move.

Common SEO Audit Mistakes to Avoid

• Not setting a goal. Without one, you can’t tell which findings matter. Decide what you’re trying to improve before you open a single report.
• Fixing cosmetic issues first. It’s tempting to tidy meta descriptions because it’s easy, but an unindexed key page costs you far more. Start with problems that block visibility.
• Trusting a tool’s score alone. Audit tools give a health score, but it’s a rough summary. A site can score well and still have a serious problem the tool doesn’t weigh properly.
• Ignoring Search Console. It’s the one place where Google tells you directly what it sees. Skipping it means guessing at things you could simply read.
• Auditing once and never going back. Websites change, and a one-off website audit goes out of date. Put a re-check in the calendar.

DIY SEO Audit or Hire a Professional?

You can absolutely do this yourself if you have a small to medium site, a few free hours, and some comfort poking around settings. The steps above are written to make that realistic. It’s also a good way to understand how your own site works.

A professional makes more sense in a few situations: large e-commerce stores with thousands of URLs, site migrations or redesigns where mistakes are expensive, sites that have lost traffic and you can’t work out why, or any time you simply don’t have the hours. A specialist brings experience in spotting patterns quickly, access to paid crawling and link data, and the ability to turn findings into a plan your developers and writers can act on. They don’t have a secret formula, and they can’t guarantee rankings. They save you time and help you avoid expensive mistakes.

If you’re leaning toward getting help, take a look at our SEO services to see how we approach it.

FAQ

How often do you recommend an SEO audit?

It depends on the size of your site, its frequency of updates, and your intended goals. Many sites perform a complete checkup once or twice per year, and lighter checks every month or every quarter, in Search Console. Frequent care may be needed for a rapidly changing or rapidly growing site.

What is the time frame of an SEO audit?

It varies. A small site with a few pages can take a few hours; a large blog or an online store can take days of intensive effort. Knowledge of the tools and whether you use a crawler will also impact it.

Can I do an SEO audit for free?

Yes. Google Search Console, GA4, PageSpeed Insights, and Bing Webmaster Tools go a long way for free. They cannot offer you competitor information, provide a detailed analysis of your backlinks, or crawl a big website rapidly. You would need to use some of the tools that are available, or work harder manually.

What is the difference between technical and full SEO audit?

A technical SEO audit only considers how your website is constructed and how search engines interact with your website, including crawling, indexing, website speed, mobile layout, and website structure. All that and more is covered in a full SEO audit, including on-page elements, content quality, backlinks, and competitors.

What impact is AI search having on SEO audits?

It is still a process of evolution; therefore, any answer is provisional. Nowadays, audits also investigate whether your answers are appearing in your top searches and if your content is understandable and reliable to be cited. The basics are still the same: A website that search engines can access and that has useful and accurate information is still the cornerstone.

Your Next Step: Start Your SEO Audit This Week

In summary, you do traffic checks, ensure that Google can crawl and index your pages, clean up your structure and links, test your site for mobile and speed, audit on-page information and content, analyze backlinks and competitors, and then create a ranked plan.

Don’t do too much this week. Do steps 1 and 2 first. If you aren’t being indexed on your key pages, then you don’t really care about the rest.

For a second set of eyes or a complete audit for you, call Digiconus. Our experience is different from location to location, and we’ll tell you the truth!