How to Run an SEO Audit — And Fix What You Actually Find

An SEO audit has a reputation problem. Most business owners have been handed one: a 40-page PDF full of red warnings, a score out of 100, and a quote at the end. Almost none of it explains what's actually costing you customers or what to do first. That's not an audit. That's a sales tool. A real audit answers three questions — can Google see your site, does it deserve to rank, and what's the shortest path from here to more calls — and it's the first thing we do before any SEO work for a client.

You can run a useful version yourself in an afternoon with free tools. This post walks through the seven checks that matter, what "bad" looks like on each, and how to turn the findings into a fix list in the right order. If you're brand new to search, our SEO for small business guide covers the fundamentals first; this one assumes you have a site and want to know why it isn't pulling its weight.

Before You Start — Set Up the Three Free Tools

You need three things open. Google Search Console shows you what Google actually sees: which pages are indexed, which have errors, and the real search terms people are finding you with. PageSpeed Insights measures speed and Core Web Vitals on any URL. And if you serve a local area, your Google Business Profile dashboard. If Search Console isn't verified yet, do that first — it takes ten minutes and without it you're auditing blind.

Give Search Console a few days to collect data if it's brand new. Everything below assumes you're looking at at least a couple of weeks of real numbers, not a fresh account.

Check 1 — Can Google Actually Index Your Site?

Start in Search Console's Pages report. You want your important pages under "Indexed" and nothing surprising under "Not indexed." The usual culprits are boring and brutal: a noindex tag left on from staging, a robots.txt that blocks a whole folder, a redirect chain that never resolves, or a page Google found but decided was a duplicate of another one. Any of these means the page doesn't exist as far as search is concerned, and nothing else in this audit can help it until it's fixed.

Then type site:yourdomain.com into Google and compare the count to the number of real pages you have. Wildly more? You've got junk being indexed — tag pages, search-result pages, old test URLs. Wildly fewer? Back to the Pages report. This one check catches the single biggest problem we find on small-business sites, and it's usually fixable in an hour. Our technical SEO post goes deeper on each of these if you hit one.

Check 2 — Speed and Core Web Vitals

Run your homepage and your two most important service pages through PageSpeed Insights, on mobile. Ignore the single score for a second and look at the Core Web Vitals block at the top: it tells you whether real visitors are having a good or poor experience, based on field data. A "Failed" there is a ranking factor and, more importantly, a conversion problem — people leave slow pages before they ever see your phone number.

The fixes are almost always the same short list: oversized images, too many scripts loading before content, cheap hosting, and a theme dragging in things you don't use. We covered the full sequence in how to make your website faster. If the scores are in the 80s-plus on mobile, move on. Chasing a 100 is a hobby, not a strategy.

Check 3 — Does It Work on a Phone?

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so this isn't optional. Pull your site up on your own phone, not a desktop browser shrunk down, and try to do what a customer would: find your hours, tap the phone number, fill in the contact form, read a service page. Note every tap that fails, every button too small to hit, every text block you had to pinch to read, and every pop-up you couldn't close. That list goes straight into the fixes.

If you get through this check and the honest answer is "the site is fine on a phone, it's just ugly and outdated," that's a different conversation — one about web design, not SEO — but it's worth having, because a redesign that ignores search is how sites lose rankings overnight.

Check 4 — On-Page Basics: Titles, Headings, Meta

This is the part most "free audit" PDFs are actually about, and it matters less than they say but more than zero. For each important page, check: does the title tag say what the page is about and where (for local businesses), in under 60 characters? Is there exactly one H1, and does it match what someone would search? Is the meta description a real sentence that makes someone want to click, not a keyword pile? Does the page have an image with descriptive alt text?

You'll usually find a homepage titled "Home," service pages titled with the company name only, and a handful of pages sharing the same description. Those are fifteen-minute fixes with real upside, because the title tag is still the strongest on-page signal you control. If you're not sure which words belong in them, that's what keyword research is for: match each page to one search someone actually types.

Check 5 — Content Gaps and Pages That Are Almost There

Now go to Search Console's Performance report, filter to the last three months, and sort by impressions. You're looking for two things. First, queries with lots of impressions and a position between roughly 8 and 20 — those are pages already on Google's radar that need a better title, stronger content, or a few internal links to cross onto page one. Second, queries that clearly describe a service you offer but where the page ranking for them is your homepage or a blog post, not a dedicated service page. That's a missing page, and building it is usually the highest-value thing an audit turns up.

Also check that nothing important is thin. A service page with two sentences and a form isn't going to outrank a competitor's 800 words with photos, pricing and FAQs. You don't need to write a novel; you need to actually answer the question the search implies.

Check 6 — Local Signals (If You Serve an Area)

For any business with a service area, the map pack matters more than the organic results, and it runs on different signals. Is your Google Business Profile claimed, in the right primary category, with real photos, current hours, and reviews coming in monthly? Are your name, address and phone number identical everywhere — site, profile, Yelp, Facebook, directories? Does the site have a page for each location or service area, with the city name in the title and the copy? Our Google Business Profile optimization guide walks the profile side step by step. Skip this check entirely if you're an online-only business; do it first if you're a local one.

Check 7 — Who Links to You, and Who Doesn't

Search Console's Links report shows which sites point at yours. For most small businesses the honest answer is "almost nobody," and that's fine as a starting point — you're competing with other small businesses in the same position. What you're looking for is anything toxic (spammy directories, foreign-language sites you've never heard of) and any obvious easy wins you're missing: your chamber of commerce, suppliers, industry associations, local press you've been in. Note them. Don't buy links, and don't let anyone sell you a "link package."

Internal links are the part you fully control and almost everyone neglects. Every service page should be reachable from the nav, linked from the homepage, and referenced from at least one blog post or related page with a descriptive anchor. If a page has zero internal links, Google reads that as "not important," no matter how good the page is.

Turn the Findings Into a Fix List — In This Order

An audit that ends in a spreadsheet nobody acts on is worth exactly nothing. Take everything you noted and put it in this order, then work down it. The order matters more than the tactics.

1. Anything blocking indexing. Noindex tags, robots blocks, broken redirects, a site that lost half its pages in a migration. Fix today.
2. Anything breaking the phone experience. Failing Core Web Vitals, unclickable buttons, forms that don't submit. These cost you customers this week, not just rankings.
3. Pages that are almost ranking. Title rewrites, content upgrades and internal links to the page-two queries from Check 5. This is the fastest visible win.
4. Missing pages. Build the dedicated service or location pages the Performance report told you people are searching for.
5. Local signals. Profile, consistency, reviews. Ongoing, not one-and-done.
6. Everything else. Meta descriptions on minor pages, alt text sweeps, link outreach. Worth doing, never urgent.

Then give it 60 to 90 days and re-check the Performance report before you touch anything else. Search moves slowly, and changing five things at once teaches you nothing about which one worked. If you'd rather hand the whole thing off, that's a fair call too — just make sure whoever you hire starts with an audit like this one and not a pitch. Our guide on how to choose an SEO company covers the questions to ask, and the work we've done shows what the fix list looks like once it's been executed.

Frequently Asked Questions