Step-by-Step SEO Audit: A Comprehensive How-To Guide (+ Website Recovery Tips After Google Updates)
An SEO audit is the first step for anyone working with clients, whether you are an SEO agency, consultant, freelancer, etc. It also doesn’t matter whether you have a site that is new and needs a boost in rankings or one that is experiencing issues (such as a loss of traffic after a Google update). Everything starts with a comprehensive SEO audit because you need to analyze client websites from all possible angles—on-page, off-page, technical, and content—to identify problems and determine what needs improvement.
I’m SEO consultant Olga Zarr, and I perform comprehensive audits of my clients’ websites before commencing any work. In this article, I’ll share my insights on this crucial process, including how to perform a quality SEO audit, which tools and templates to use, and how to track the results afterward.
Key takeaways
- A comprehensive SEO audit is the foundation for an effective SEO strategy. It identifies SEO issues and outlines next steps.
- Start with a manual review to understand site functionality and identify potential issues. Then, use automated tools (Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SE Ranking’s Website Audit, etc.) to gather data and insights. Follow a detailed checklist (e.g., SEOSLY’s 180+ steps) covering technical SEO, on-page SEO, and content optimization.
- Prioritize tasks by importance, urgency, and ease of implementation. Address critical issues first, and identify and implement quick SEO wins for immediate positive results.
- Use spreadsheets to track issues, their priority level, and any changes made to them. Regularly update them. For an in-depth SEO overview, use the Google Looker Studio template to monitor key metrics, such as rankings, keywords, blog performance, conversions, and traffic.
Why do an SEO audit?
You should always begin with a full SEO audit. It sets the foundation for your SEO strategy for the next two to five weeks, six months, or more depending on how big the project is and how long you plan to work with your client. An SEO audit clarifies everything — it helps you pinpoint the issues, identify areas that need attention, and outline next steps.
If a client contacts you about a traffic drop issue, an SEO audit helps you quickly understand the situation. You may receive a list of pages with lost traffic and then investigate the underlying issues. For example, the problem might be due to site-wide technical issues that, once fixed, show immediate improvements. Or, all signs may indicate a Google Core Update affecting the site. In this case, the next steps will be different.
Plus, SEO audits clear any doubts. For instance, you may initially think the traffic change is due to the search engine update, but it could actually be a technical issue.
Which tools should you use for an SEO audit?
First, you will need a tool that can crawl and analyze the site so that you’ll have all the URLs, images extracted, everything JavaScript-executed, all the status codes, and more, highlighting any issues that require your attention. The tools below are suitable for this:
- Screaming Frog. This is one of the most popular SEO tools, known for its website crawler functionality. It crawls websites’ URLs and provides detailed information about each one, including metadata, HTTP status codes, internal linking, and more.
- JetOctopus. This is a SaaS crawler designed especially for e-commerce businesses and digital agencies. The tool provides data on crawled pages, their status codes, indexing issues, etc.
- Sitebulb. This tool lets you scan websites and find issues preventing them from ranking higher.
- SE Ranking’s Website Audit. This tool provides a comprehensive list of technical SEO issues, from critical errors to minor suggestions.
You will also need official tools from search engines. For instance, the following are perfect for a well-rounded SEO toolkit:
- Google Page Speed Insights: For analyzing speed and Core Web Vitals metrics.
- Google Search Console: Get insights into what Google is seeing on your site. It highlights any errors the search engine wants to draw your attention to. For instance, the tool will show you indexing and crawling errors.
- Google Analytics: Helps you track website traffic, user behavior, and page-specific performance.
Let’s take a closer look at these tools below.
Remember to use these tools wisely and trust in your own experience. Your personal experience is key to making the best judgments and drawing accurate conclusions. Tools can suggest ideas and offer helpful tips, but just because a tool identifies something as an issue doesn’t necessarily make it one. Use your own judgment to determine its impact on your site.
How to perform an SEO audit step-by-step
Of course, there are different approaches to what an SEO audit should look like, but here is a formula that includes both manual work and automated stages, as well as the use of templates and checklists.
Step 1. Start with a manual review
When starting an SEO audit, it’s ideal to spend around 30 minutes exploring the website. Open it on your phone, click around, try adding items to carts, apply filters in e-commerce scenarios — basically, familiarize yourself with how the site functions to spot potential issues quickly. Within the first three minutes of browsing, you should be able to identify potential problems as a result of knowing where to look. It’s important to manually inspect everything upfront so that when you dive into the data, it provides meaningful insights rather than just raw numbers. This approach ensures you’re well-prepared to uncover the real issues and not overlook critical details.
But of course, that’s just the first step. The next stages involve automation and utilizing various tools.
Step 2. Go to Google Search Console
Review every report there. Google Search Console pulls data directly from Google, making it the most accurate source of information.
Pay special attention to the following reports:
- Performance report. Here, you can track clicks, impressions, CTR, and keyword positions. During an SEO audit, this will help you understand where the site has lost traffic or rankings.
- Indexing report. This identifies how many URLs on the website have been crawled and indexed by Google. In the Pages section, you can find any issues preventing pages from being indexed. Clicking on the specific issue detected by the tool gives you access to a list of pages affected by it.
You can also check the section below for tips on improving pages to boost their search result rankings.
- Experience report. Pay attention to the Core Web Vitals section, which has data on the website’s loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Open a report and click on the numbers in the table to discover a list of pages with experience issues that pages might have.
These are the main reports to focus on. For a deeper analysis, look at other reports like Enhancements, Sitemaps, Security & Manual actions, and Shopping (for e-commerce websites), and more. All these reports are explained in detail in this comprehensive Google Search Console guide.
Step 3. Use Google Analytics
This tool helps you understand the impact of SEO issues. Google Analytics contains many metrics. We won’t cover each one in detail but will highlight the main ones:
- Website traffic. This is likely the most important metric to consider during an SEO audit. A traffic drop usually signals an issue that needs immediate attention. Your organic traffic data can be found in the Traffic Acquisition report under the Acquisition section, by selecting the Organic Search option in the table.
- Conversions. It’s also important to review the number of desired actions completed by visitors on a website. This metric helps evaluate the effectiveness of website SEO, providing insights into the success of calls-to-action, landing pages, and the overall conversion funnel. To track conversions, navigate to the User acquisition report under the Acquisition section. Then, select the desired action in the Key events column and review the Organic Search row.
- Bounce rate. This metric shows the percentage of visitors who come to a website and leave after viewing only one page without taking any further action. An increase in the bounce rate points to website issues. Among the most common causes are low page load speed or design problems on mobile devices. To track the bounce rate metric, you need to manually add it to your report. Just open the report you want to customize and click the pencil icon in the upper-right corner. Then, choose Metrics in the Report data and add Bounce rate.
- Engagement rate. For sessions to be considered engaged, they should last at least 10 seconds, include at least one conversion event, or feature at least two screen or page views. If pages have a low engagement rate, they’re likely not converting many visitors. This means you should assess the content of these pages. Go to the Acquisition section and click on User acquisition. You’ll see the Engagement rate data in the table.
To learn more about essential metrics in GA4, check out this comprehensive guide.
Step 4. Follow the SEO checklist to ensure you don’t miss anything important
Next, follow the SEOSLY SEO audit checklist. It consists of 180+ steps and covers all important aspects of SEO. With this checklist, you can gather basic information about the site you are about to audit.
Most steps are connected with technical SEO, but you’ll also find on-page SEO and content points, which are just as crucial for website optimization success. Here are some example steps from the checklist:
- Analyzing the backlink profile
- Reviewing the hosting provider and domain history
- Checking the XML sitemap, robots.txt, and robots meta tags
- Conducting an internal linking analysis
- Evaluating the website structure
- Identifying canonicalization and duplicate content issues
- Performing a mobile-friendliness and UX test
- Verifying content uniqueness
- Optimizing on-page elements: titles, descriptions, headings, and URLs
Step 5. Review errors in other tools
After you have completed all of these steps, analyze the website using popular SEO tools like SE Ranking. This prevents you from missing anything and helps you identify additional issues that need to be addressed.
Here’s an example of a report in SE Ranking’s Website Audit:
You’ll see a report on 120+ mainly technical parameters, such as broken links, duplicate content, crawl errors, missing images, media asset accessibility, and many more. Each of the following are classified by importance: Errors (severe issues you need to fix immediately), Warnings (less critical issues, but still harmful to your website), and Notices (issues you need to pay attention to).
You can also see tips on fixing issues.
How do you decide which issues to fix first?
Once the SEO audit is complete, and you know which issues need to be fixed, the next step is to prioritize the order in which to address them.
Generally, you want to prioritize issues based on their importance, urgency, and ease of implementation. On large sites (and especially e-commerce sites), fixing even minor issues can take months. However, there may be smaller, quicker fixes that can have a significant impact. Assess which issues are critical and currently harming SEO. These should be addressed first.
Another useful tactic is to identify quick SEO wins. These help boost client trust by showing them positive results sooner. SEO typically takes time to show significant improvements, but quick wins give the impression of immediate growth. While addressing urgent issues is crucial, it’s also important to prioritize those that are highly impactful. Less critical but urgent tasks should be scheduled for later, and only after critical issues and potential quick wins have been addressed.
Here’s an example of a critical issue:
A client approached me because their website wasn’t showing up in Google search results for their brand name. They wanted a detailed analysis to understand why this was happening. The first thing I discovered was a noindex tag on their site. This wasn’t an issue with their brand but a technical problem preventing their site from being indexed by Google. Until this noindex directive was removed, Google couldn’t even consider the site for search results. Without resolving this, there was no point in doing anything else since the site remained invisible to Google. Another example could be a problem with redirects. If redirects aren’t working correctly and return 404 errors after a site migration, it can be disastrous. These issues need to be fixed before proceeding with any other optimizations.
Here’s an example of a quick win that can be easily implemented:
Suppose you have an e-commerce website where category pages contain links to specific products. If these links use generic anchor text like Click here, they carry no SEO value. A simple fix for developers is to replace these Click here links with anchor text that uses the actual product names. This can be done with a single line of code. By making this change, Google can better understand the types of products on the site and the relevant keywords. This quick and powerful fix can enhance SEO without being an urgent issue.
How do you monitor all processes and results?
Let’s say you ran the SEO audit, you found the issues, you told the team which issues need to be fixed first. Now you need to monitor the implementation process and check regularly if the suggested changes made had a positive or negative impact.
Consider using a spreadsheet with all issues and their priorities. Laying everything out into an SEO roadmap ensures nothing is missed so you can organize all steps systematically and monitor tasks effectively. Assign deadlines to each task and approve them together with clients. Talk with your clients about each point, when it can be done, and whether there are issues in its implementation. Continue by reviewing these tasks every week or every two weeks, and providing updates on the status.
You can also use another spreadsheet to track each of the changes. For instance, note the date when a specific error was fixed. This can help you understand if those changes led to improvements or if they resulted in traffic drops. For example, you can format the spreadsheet so that all the URLs are paired with their mapped keywords, titles and specific date.
You should have central Google spreadsheets to keep everything organized. Make sure to update them regularly to avoid losing control and keeping them manageable.
Managing data with a Looker Studio template
You can use the Google Looker Studio template, which integrates data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and SE Ranking’s Rank Tracker (this tool is particularly useful because it also lets you track rankings on Bing and other search engines).
With this template, you can see all the key metrics related to positions, target keywords, blog post performance, conversions, and traffic. You can easily switch dates and compare periods, giving you and your clients a comprehensive overview of SEO performance. This makes it simple to monitor progress and make informed decisions on a daily basis.
To get this comprehensive template for free, simply subscribe to the SEOSLY newsletter.
Bonus: Building a website recovery roadmap after Google updates
Success after building a recovery roadmap generally depends on the type of Google update. But if we’re talking about core updates, they usually involve relevance shifts. Google Helpful Content updates are similar in that they target the quality of content meant for people first. There are three possible scenarios of impact on the website:
- No effect: This is often the case for websites that adhere strictly to SEO fundamentals without any tricks. These websites typically aren’t affected by core updates.
- Positive effect: Google occasionally changes what they value, and if your site aligns well with these changes, you might see a traffic spike.
- Negative effect: On the flip side, if Google starts valuing something your site lacks, you might lose traffic.
In most cases, Google doesn’t announce groundbreaking changes. Its focus is increasingly on quality, prioritizing user-centric content, and encouraging the creation of genuinely good content.
So, the best course of action from the start is typically to avoid making immediate changes. It’s important to wait until the update is finished. Sometimes reversals occur during an update, where you might lose traffic initially but regain it by the end of the update. You might even come out ahead on occasion.
Once the update is over, analyze the new rankings, understand what makes your competitors rank higher. Look at what top ranking sites have that you don’t, and identify if they have more Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness or more hands-on Experience.
Use these insights to inform your strategy moving forward.
And don’t forget about the SEO fundamentals: optimizing content, mapping keywords, titles, headings, tables of content, FAQs, and internal linking. The results follow suit when to do things right.
To sum it up
Regular SEO audits are crucial for every website to promptly identify and resolve issues, helping to maintain or even improve traffic and rankings.
An effective search engine optimization audit combines two elements: manual review and automated analysis with tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, GA4, and SE Ranking. To ensure nothing is missed, follow a comprehensive SEO checklist.
For monitoring results, use spreadsheets and Looker Studio templates to keep track of progress and make informed decisions.
This comprehensive approach will help you successfully optimize websites.
