Knowing how to do an SEO audit is less about tools than about order. Most DIY audits start with a crawler, produce hundreds of warnings, and stall. A useful audit starts with what is actually happening in Google, works through six areas in a set sequence, and ends with a short list of fixes ranked by impact.
This guide walks through that sequence for a small or medium business site, using mostly free tools. Each step links to a deeper guide if you need more detail.
What do you need before you start?
- Google Search Console access, which is the most important tool in the whole audit
- Google Analytics or your analytics tool, to see which pages bring leads
- A crawler such as Screaming Frog, which is free for up to 500 URLs
- PageSpeed Insights, which is free
- Optionally, a backlink tool such as Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz
- A spreadsheet for findings
Also write down the five to ten pages that matter most to the business, usually the home page, main service or product pages and contact page. Every finding will be judged against these.
Step 1: Start with Search Console
Before crawling anything, look at what Google is already doing with the site. This tells you where to focus, and it is the step most guides on how to do an SEO audit skip.
- Performance: compare the last three months with the same period last year. Note pages and queries that grew or fell
- Pages: check how many pages are indexed, and whether any of your key pages are excluded
- Manual actions and security issues: confirm both are empty
- Core Web Vitals: note whether mobile pages are rated poor or need improvement
Step 2: Check crawling and indexing
Crawl the site and look for anything stopping Google from reaching or indexing the key pages.
- Key pages returning anything other than a 200 status
- Noindex tags or robots.txt rules blocking pages that should rank
- Canonical tags pointing to the wrong URL
- Redirect chains and broken internal links
- Duplicate versions of the site, such as http and https or www and non-www, both loading
These are the blockers. Anything found here goes to the top of the list. The technical SEO audit checklist covers the full set of technical points, and crawled currently not indexed covers the most common indexing problem.
Step 3: Review on-page basics on key pages
For each key page, check that it targets one clear keyword and says so in the places that matter: the title tag, the main heading, the opening paragraph and the meta description. Check that no two key pages target the same keyword. Our on-page SEO checklist has the full list.
Step 4: Assess content
- Pages with almost no search traffic over the past year
- Several pages covering the same topic
- Thin pages with little content beyond a heading and a paragraph
- Outdated information, prices or dates
- Missing pages for services or questions customers search for
On a site with many pages, this step becomes a content audit of its own.
Step 5: Check speed and mobile
Run your key pages through PageSpeed Insights and focus on the field data, which shows real users, rather than the lab score. Open each key page on a phone and try to do what a customer would: read the service, find the phone number, submit the form.
Step 6: Look at links and local signals
- In Search Console's Links report, check which sites link to you and which pages receive links
- Compare your referring domains with two or three competitors in a backlink tool, if you have one
- For local businesses, check your Google Business Profile, reviews and main listings against the map pack competitors
Local businesses should run the full local SEO audit for this step.
Step 7: Check AI visibility
Confirm that robots.txt does not block the AI crawlers you want to reach you, such as OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search. Then ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what they know about your business and who they recommend for your main service, and note anything wrong or missing.
Step 8: Prioritize and write it up
| Priority | What goes here |
|---|---|
| Fix now | Anything blocking key pages from being crawled or indexed |
| Next | On-page and content problems on key pages |
| Then | Speed and mobile problems on key pages, competing pages to merge |
| Later | Sitewide minor warnings, low-traffic pages, nice-to-haves |
Write each finding with the evidence, the pages affected and the fix, so it can be handed to whoever does the work. Our guide to what a good SEO audit report looks like has a template.
How long does an SEO audit take?
For a small business site of up to a few hundred pages, a focused DIY audit following these steps takes one to two days. The first time takes longer, mostly because of learning the tools. Larger sites, or audits that include a full content review and competitor analysis, take longer.
What mistakes do DIY audits usually make?
- Treating every crawler warning as equally important
- Chasing a perfect speed score instead of real-user field data
- Auditing the whole site evenly instead of starting with the pages that bring in business
- Fixing missing alt text on old blog posts while key pages are not indexed
- Changing many things at once, so nobody can tell what worked
- Not saving a baseline before making changes
Most of these come from the same root: starting with the tool rather than the question. Learning how to do an SEO audit well is mostly learning to ask which findings affect the pages that matter, and ignore the rest for now.
What should you have at the end?
- A saved baseline of clicks, impressions and positions for your key pages
- A short list of blockers, fixed or scheduled first
- A ranked list of the remaining findings, each with the pages affected and the fix
- A date to recheck the key pages in Search Console, usually four to eight weeks later
When should you get a professional audit?
When traffic has dropped and you cannot find why, before a migration or redesign, or when you have found problems but cannot tell which ones matter. What a paid audit should include, and what it should cost, is covered in how much an SEO audit costs.
The short version
How to do an SEO audit in one sentence: start with Search Console, fix whatever blocks your key pages, then check on-page, content, speed, links and AI visibility in that order, and rank the findings by impact. If you would rather have it done for you, our SEO audit services follow this same sequence in depth.
