An SEO audit is a health check for your website. It looks at every page the way a search engine would, and lists the problems that make your pages harder to find, understand or rank: missing titles, broken links, slow pages, duplicate content and so on.
A good audit doesn’t just list problems. It tells you which ones matter, why, and what the fix is.
What an SEO audit checks
Most audits cover five areas:
- Crawling and indexing. Can search engines reach your pages, and are the right ones allowed into the index? This covers robots.txt, sitemaps, noindex tags, redirects and canonical tags.
- On-page basics. Does every page have a clear, unique title and description, one main heading, and images with alt text?
- Content. Are there thin pages, near-duplicates, or several pages competing for the same search?
- Links. Are internal links pointing at live pages, and do important pages get links from related ones?
- Speed and experience. Do pages load quickly on a phone, and do they stay stable while loading?
What an SEO audit isn’t
An audit isn’t a keyword strategy, a backlink campaign or a ranking guarantee. It tells you what’s getting in the way. What you want to rank for, and what content you need to get there, is a separate conversation, although a good audit often shows where to start.
How often should you audit your site?
A one-off audit is a snapshot. Websites change every time someone publishes a post, edits a menu or installs a plugin, so problems come back. For most small sites, a full audit every month or two is a sensible minimum, with a quick check after any big change like a redesign or a move to new hosting.
The better option is to check continuously and fix issues as they appear, which is what SEO automation is for.
How to run a basic audit yourself
You can do a useful audit with free tools:
- Google Search Console. Check the Pages report for indexing problems and the Core Web Vitals report for slow pages.
- A site crawler. Crawl the site and sort by status code, title and description to find broken links, missing titles and duplicates.
- PageSpeed Insights. Test your homepage and your most important pages on mobile.
- A spreadsheet. List each issue, the pages it affects and the fix, then work through it in order.
Our on-page SEO checklist lists the 16 checks worth running on every page.
What to fix first
Start with anything that stops pages being found: broken links, pages accidentally set to noindex, sitemap errors and missing titles. Next, deal with duplicates and pages competing with each other, since those need a decision about which page should win. Bulk fixes like descriptions and alt text are safe to leave until last.
Audit once, or keep it fixed?
OnPage Agent runs a full audit on your WordPress site every day, applies the safe fixes through its plugin, and sends bigger changes to you for approval. Every change is logged and can be undone in one click, so the audit never turns into a to-do list that nobody gets to.
