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How-to guide, 5 steps

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 a process to follow.

Edited bySunny Patel

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Turning audit findings into an action plan

  • High impact Expected impact, Low effort Effort to fix: Do nowHigh impact, quick fixes such as indexing blockers.
  • High impact Expected impact, High effort Effort to fix: PlanHigh impact projects such as site structure or speed work.
  • Low impact Expected impact, Low effort Effort to fix: BatchSmall tidy-ups to group into one session.
  • Low impact Expected impact, High effort Effort to fix: DeferLow value and costly; revisit later.
The final step of this guide: sort every finding by impact and effort so the audit ends in a short, ordered to-do list.

  1. Step 1: 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.

    Tool for this stepSemrush

    from £113.40/mo

    Semrush's Site Audit checks a long list of technical SEO issues and groups them by severity, so you know where to start.

    Semrush plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Seobility (from €59.90/mo)

  2. Step 2: 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. Most sites never need to disavow; reserve the Disavow tool for severe cases such as known paid or manipulative links.

    Tool for this stepSemrush

    from £113.40/mo

    Semrush's Backlink Audit flags potentially harmful referring domains and can export a disavow file for you to review before submitting it to Google.

    Semrush plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Moz Pro (from $49/mo)

  3. Step 3: 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.

    Tool for this stepSemrush

    from £113.40/mo

    Semrush's On Page SEO Checker generates prioritised on-page recommendations for each page, using competitor data to suggest improvements.

    Semrush plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Rank Math Pro (from €7.99/mo billed yearly)

  4. Step 4: 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.

    Tool for this stepSE Ranking

    from £95/mo

    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.

    SE Ranking plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Semrush (from £113.40/mo)

  5. Step 5: 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).

    Tool for this stepSemrush

    from £113.40/mo

    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.

    Semrush plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Seobility (from €59.90/mo)