How to Do an SEO Audit (Full Website Audit Guide)
An SEO audit is a systematic review of everything affecting a website's search performance — technical health, on-page signals, backlink profile, and content quality. It sounds daunting but with the right tools, a solid audit takes a few hours and produces a clear action list. Here's the process I follow.
Run a technical crawl to find structural issues
Start every SEO audit with a full technical crawl. This surfaces broken links, redirect errors, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and crawl depth issues — all the foundational problems that prevent your other SEO work from being effective.
Semrush's Site Audit is the most comprehensive crawler in the tool. It checks 140+ technical SEO factors and prioritises issues by severity — so you know exactly where to start.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Audit your backlink profile for toxic links
Pull your full backlink profile and look for red flags: links from spammy sites, irrelevant foreign-language sites, link networks, and sites with toxic anchor text. A small number of toxic links can trigger manual review. Use the Disavow tool for severe cases.
Semrush's Backlink Audit assigns a Toxicity Score to every referring domain. It can generate a disavow file automatically for you to submit to Google — saving hours of manual assessment.
Budget alternative: Moz Pro (from $49/mo)
Assess on-page SEO for your most important pages
Review title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, and content quality for your top 20 pages by traffic and revenue. Check for: missing or duplicate titles, keyword misalignment, thin content, and missing internal links.
Semrush's On Page SEO Checker generates prioritised on-page recommendations for each page — pulling in competitor data to show exactly what improvements would lift your rankings.
Budget alternative: Rank Math Pro (from $5.75/mo)
Analyse keyword performance against Search Console data
Connect your Search Console data and look for: keywords where you rank positions 4-10 with high impressions (quick win opportunities), pages with high impressions but low CTR (title/meta fixes needed), and keywords where you've lost ground over the past 6 months.
SE Ranking's Search Console integration presents GSC data alongside rank tracking data in the same view — making it easy to find the 'almost ranking' pages that need one focused push.
Budget alternative: Semrush (from $139.95/mo)
Compile findings into a prioritised action list
Organise all audit findings into three buckets: (1) Critical — fix immediately (crawl errors, penalties, indexation issues). (2) High priority — address this month (thin content, missing metadata, toxic backlinks). (3) Long-term — address over the next quarter (content expansion, link building).
Semrush's consolidated audit dashboard gives you a site health score and a prioritised issue list in one view — making it easy to export a clean action list to share with a client or your team.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)