SEO audit: what to check and what to fix first.

The same scene comes round every few months. A company spends a fortune rebuilding its website, the thing looks gorgeous, and half a year later nobody is arriving from Google. Nobody stopped to check whether the search engine could actually read it, whether the copy answered what people type, or whether three versions of the same page were fighting each other. That is what an SEO audit is for: opening the bonnet before you spend any more.

What an SEO audit actually is

An SEO audit is an ordered review of everything that decides whether your site shows up in search: the technical side, the content, the links and the data you are already generating without looking at it. It is not a list of errors pulled from a tool. Anyone can produce that in five minutes and it changes nothing.

The value is in what comes next: working out which of those errors are actually costing you traffic, which ones don't matter, and in what order to fix them. You can tell the difference by the deliverable. An automated scan hands you 340 issues and leaves you exactly where you were. A proper analysis gives you six things, in this order, and what to expect from each.

What gets checked in an SEO audit

The work usually splits into four blocks. They are not sealed compartments —a technical fault ends up ruining the content— but the split helps to order the job.

Technical SEO audit: letting Google in and making sense to it

This is the dull part, and the part that breaks most often. Whether robots.txt is blocking folders it shouldn't. Whether the sitemap still lists pages that no longer exist. Whether some pages carry a noindex tag nobody meant to leave there, which happens far more often than you would think after a migration. Whether redirects chain three hops before reaching their destination. Whether the www and non-www versions point to the same place.

Speed belongs here too. Core Web Vitals are no magic ranking button, but a site that takes four seconds to load on a phone loses visitors before Google gets a chance to judge it. We go through all of this in our guide to technical SEO.

Content: whether you answer what people are searching for

Here you compare what you have published against what people actually search. Out come the classics: four pages saying nearly the same thing and getting in each other's way, duplicate titles across half the site, product pages with two sentences on them, and endless articles that never answer the question that brought the visitor in.

Before writing anything new, get the keyword research done. Otherwise you end up producing copy for searches nobody makes, which is an expensive way to fill a blog.

Links: who points at you and how you spread strength internally

You look at the profile of links coming in, at whether you are dragging along toxic links from some old campaign and, above all, at how the internal links are arranged. That last point is the most neglected and the cheapest to fix: pointing four internal links at the service page you want to rank takes an afternoon and it shows. If you then want to work on link building, better to have your own house in order first.

Your own data and the competition

Without data, an audit is theory. Google Search Console tells you which searches you already appear for, in what position and how many people click. That is where the profitable openings show up: pages hovering around position eleven that move to eight with a better-written title. No scanning tool spots that; you only see it by reading your own numbers.

Then look at who is ahead of you for the results that matter: which of their pages rank, and what they cover that you don't. Google Search Central's documentation is the reference for what the search engine values and what it doesn't, well above whatever is being repeated on forums.

How to prioritise what the SEO audit turns up

This is the step that separates a useful report from a PDF that dies in an inbox. Every finding gets sorted by two things: how far it can move the needle and how much it costs to do.

• First, whatever is blocking. An important page deindexed, a badly written robots.txt, a migration that left half the site returning 404s. Usually an afternoon's work, with the effect visible in weeks.
• Then, whatever pays off quickly. Titles and descriptions on pages already circling the top 10, internal links to the service pages, content that can be extended rather than written from scratch.
• Last, whatever builds. New content, authority, architecture. It takes months, but it is what eventually puts distance between you and somebody who has been there for years.

An order like that lets you start on Monday with something concrete instead of staring at a spreadsheet with 340 rows in it.

The problems we find on almost every site

• The page the business most wants to sell has not a single internal link pointing at it.
• A blog post and the service page compete for the same search, and the post wins — the one that sells nothing.
• Canonical tags pointing at the home page across the whole site, inherited from a badly configured theme.
• Two-megabyte images on the home page. On fibre you won't notice; on somebody's phone in the street, you will.
• Search Console installed three years ago and not opened since.
• Copy written to please the boss rather than the person searching. It reads beautifully and nobody looks for it.

Local businesses have one more, and it is the quickest to show results once corrected: the abandoned Google listing, with no new photos and no replies to reviews. We cover that at length in our piece on the Google Business Profile.

How often to repeat it

For most businesses, a full review once a year is enough. After a migration or a redesign, always: that is when most things break and when they are hardest to spot by eye. In between, a short quarterly check on four indicators —indexed pages, clicks, average position and new errors— saves you the expensive surprises.

If you compete in a crowded sector or publish content every week, shorten those intervals. Search engine optimisation shifts on its own even when you touch nothing, because everyone else is touching theirs.

What the deliverable should contain

Before hiring anyone, ask that the deliverable include at least four things:

• Problems sorted by priority, not by type of error.
• What each fix is expected to gain, even roughly.
• Who carries out each item: some tasks belong to a developer, others to whoever writes, others to whoever runs the site.
• A measured starting point, so you can compare in six months and know whether any of it worked.

If what lands on your desk is an eighty-page document full of tool screenshots and no order to it, you were sold the report, not the audit.

How we run SEO audits at Magnes Factory

At Magnes Factory we approach it like this:

• We start from your business, not from the tool: what you want to sell and where your margin is.
• We cross the technical side, the content and the links with what your Search Console data is already telling us.
• We hand over a short, ordered list, separating what we do from what needs your team.
• Three months later we measure the same things again, to see what moved and what didn't.

Because an audit fixes nothing on its own. What changes things is doing what it says, in the order it says, and looking at the numbers again once enough time has passed.

Frequently asked questions