SEO audit

An audit is diagnosis, not treatment. You are not trying to fix everything in one pass. You are mapping what exists so you can rank problems by impact. Most audits sort findings into a few buckets.

What an audit covers

• Crawling and indexing. Can search engines reach the pages you want ranked? Google’s own advice is to start here: use the URL Inspection tool and the Page indexing report in Search Console to confirm important URLs are actually indexed.
• On-page and content. Titles, headings, and whether each page delivers original, helpful content in Google’s phrasing, rather than thin or duplicated pages.
• Technical health. Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, broken links, redirect chains, and robots.txt rules that block the wrong paths.
• Links and authority. The backlink profile, internal linking, and any toxic patterns.

In 2026 a fourth question matters: are you visible in AI answers? An audit now also checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews can reach and cite your pages, because that visibility no longer shows up the way ten blue links did.

The deliverable that matters is not a 200-point checklist. It is a short, ranked list: what is costing you traffic, in what order, and how to fix it. Search Console stays the source of truth for what is actually happening in search, and an audit turns that raw data into a plan you can act on.