SEO Audit Checklist

The technical ground an audit should cover, and the order to work through it.

How to use this list

Work down it in order. The categories near the top decide whether a page can be understood at all, and the ones below decide how well it performs once it is.

  1. 1

    Start with what stops a page being read

    Crawlability, robots directives and canonical tags come first. A page that cannot be reached or is pointing elsewhere gains nothing from any other fix on this list.

  2. 2

    Then what tells a machine what the page is

    Titles, headings and structured data are the plain statement of what a page covers. Search engines and AI assistants both lean on them, and both are cheap to get right.

  3. 3

    Then how it performs and how it is trusted

    Core Web Vitals, images, security headers and certificates. These rarely rescue a page on their own, and they steadily hold one back when they are wrong.

The 17 scored categories

These are the areas a technical audit should cover. Work through them in the order above: the ones near the top decide whether a page can be read at all.

  • AI-SEO
  • Entity
  • GEO
  • Content
  • On-Page
  • Headings
  • Schema
  • Links
  • Technical
  • Performance
  • Usability
  • Images
  • Social
  • Access
  • Security
  • WP Sec
  • Email

Where sites usually lose ground

A handful of these areas come back wrong far more often than the rest, and they are rarely the ones a site owner expects. Our audit reports which ones they are on your site, with the value it measured for each.

Check it for AI assistants as well

Assistants send their own crawlers, and a site can welcome search engines while turning those away without anyone noticing. Whatever list you work from, add three questions to it: are those crawlers allowed, does your structured data say who you are, and do you publish the files those systems now read.

Have it checked for you

The audit runs every item on this list and reports the value it found for each one.

Check your site against it free