How to Do an SEO Audit (Free Checklist)

An SEO audit is a structured health check of your website: can search engines find it, does it work properly, does the content deserve to rank, and does anything about it signal trouble. If you have ever wondered how to do an SEO audit yourself, the good news is that the process is a checklist, not a dark art. This guide walks through the four passes we run on every site, in order, using tools that are free or close to it, and finishes with the audit checklist you can work through this week.

What an SEO audit actually checks

Every audit worth the name answers four questions. Access: can Google crawl and index the pages you care about? Health: is the site fast, secure and technically sound? Relevance: do the pages match what people actually search for? Authority: does the rest of the web vouch for you? Most rankings problems trace back to one of those four, which is why a site audit that jumps straight to keywords usually misses the real issue. Work through them in order, because there is no point polishing content Google cannot even index. That order is also the difference between an SEO audit that finds causes and one that merely lists symptoms.

Before you start, set up the two free tools the whole process leans on: Google Search Console, which shows you the site the way Google sees it, and a crawler such as Screaming Frog, which is free for the first 500 URLs and shows you the site the way a robot walks it.

Step 1: crawling and indexing

Start with the blunt test: search site:yourdomain.com.au and see what comes back. Missing pages, or strange ones you forgot existed, are your first findings. Then open Search Console's Pages report and read the reasons pages are not indexed: noindex tags left over from development, redirect chains, duplicates without a canonical, or pages Google crawled and chose to ignore. Check that your robots.txt is not blocking anything important and that your XML sitemap is submitted and clean. This step finds the catastrophic problems, and catastrophic problems are surprisingly common: a single stray noindex can silently remove a money page.

Step 2: technical health and speed

Now run the crawl, the engine room of any SEO audit. The crawler will surface broken links, redirect chains, missing or duplicate title tags, thin pages and orphaned pages that nothing links to. Alongside it, test your key templates in PageSpeed Insights, because speed problems live in templates, not individual pages: fix the product template and you fix a thousand products. Pay attention to the Core Web Vitals, confirm the site is fully on HTTPS, and check it renders properly on a phone. Our full technical SEO checklist expands this pass into every individual check if you want to go deeper.

Step 3: on-page, content and intent

With the plumbing verified, read the site the way a customer would. Does each important page target one clear search intent, with a descriptive title, a heading structure that makes sense and copy that actually answers the question? Look for pages competing with each other for the same keyword, thin pages that add nothing, and gaps where a service you sell has no page at all. Check internal links: your most valuable pages should be the easiest to reach. For online stores this pass has its own extra layer of category, product and filter checks, which we cover separately in our guide to running an ecommerce SEO audit. This is the pass that turns an SEO audit from a technical exercise into a commercial one, because it looks at the pages that actually earn the money.

Step 4: authority, links and reputation

Finally, look outward. Review who links to you in Search Console's Links report, or in a paid tool if you have one. You are looking for two things: whether you have enough quality links to compete, and whether anything toxic points at you. Compare your profile against the two or three competitors who outrank you; the gap is usually visible within minutes. Round out the pass with your Google Business Profile and reviews if you serve a local area, because for local queries reputation is authority.

How to do an SEO audit without paid tools

Everything above can be done free: Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, a 500-URL crawl and an honest read of your own pages. That is genuinely how to do an SEO audit on a small site, and it will surface most of the problems that matter. What paid tools add is scale and history: rank tracking over time, competitor keyword data and deeper link indexes. If the site is large, or the stakes are high, that data earns its subscription; if you run a ten-page local site, the free stack is plenty.

The condensed SEO audit checklist: confirm indexing in Search Console; check robots.txt and the sitemap; crawl the site and fix broken links and duplicate titles; test speed on your key templates; review every money page against its search intent; map internal links to your priority pages; review backlinks against your top competitors; and write the findings up as a prioritised list, not a report card. Repeat once or twice a year, and after any redesign or migration.

That is how to do an SEO audit from start to finish; the discipline is repeating it rather than filing it. An SEO audit is diagnosis, and diagnosis is only worth anything if treatment follows. If you would rather skip to the treatment, that is what our SEO services are built around: audit first, then fix in priority order.

Andy MerrittFounder of SEO Soar. Senior SEO specialist, Melbourne. I work on every campaign directly, no juniors, no runaround.