SEO Audit Checklist: a Sample Report and My 47-Point Method

An SEO audit is a methodical analysis of a website to find what keeps it from being found in search engines, then rank the fixes by impact. It covers four pillars: technical, content, authority and experience. Its deliverable is a report, and the quality of that report decides whether the audit is any use. An SEO audit checklist makes sure nothing is missed; the report decides what gets fixed first.

I run audits regularly, and I always see the same thing: most sites do not have fifty problems, they have three expensive ones and forty that will change nothing. So I start by showing you what a report that makes that cut looks like, using a fictional example, then the method and the checklist to produce your own.

SEO audit report example: the 5 parts

Here is the structure I recommend, part by part, with what each part contains and a sample excerpt. The example is an imaginary site: "Atelier Bureau", an office furniture manufacturer selling to businesses, 420 pages.

1. The summary: one page to decide

This is the only part management will read in full. In a few lines, it says where the site stands, what is holding it back and which projects to launch first. If a report opens with three pages of methodology or with a score out of 100, it is badly built.

SUMMARY (fictional example: Atelier Bureau, 420 pages)

The site is healthy on most of its pages, but three defects
hold back most of its potential:

1. The 180 product pages declare their category page as the
   canonical version: Google indexes only some of them.
2. 38 blog posts receive no internal links.
3. Two service pages target the same query and compete.

These three fixes come before everything else.
Details and order of work are in part 4.

2. The baseline: the figures before any fix

Without an initial snapshot, no gain will be provable six months from now. This part freezes the situation on the day of the audit, with the source of each figure so the exact same measurement can be repeated later.

3. Findings, pillar by pillar

Each pillar (technical, content, authority, experience) gets its own section. A finding is always written the same way: what I observed, how many pages are affected, why it is a problem, what needs to be done. A tool alert copied over without explanation is not a finding.

FINDING T-03 (fictional example)

Observed       : 180 product pages carry a canonical tag
                 that points to their category page.
Pages affected : 180, i.e. 43% of the site.
Why            : Google treats these pages as duplicates of
                 the category and may choose not to index them.
Action         : make the canonical self-referencing in the
                 product template (one line to change).
Impact: high   Effort: low   Priority: 1

4. The prioritized action plan: a table excerpt

This is the heart of the report. Each finding becomes a row, rated on impact, number of pages affected and effort. The order of work follows from those three ratings, never from the order in which the problems were found.

Look at the last row. Images without an alt attribute are the defect that affects the most elements, and many tools put it at the top of the list. Yet it comes last, because it barely changes rankings. The template canonical affects fewer elements, but it blocks indexing on nearly half the site: that is the one that opens the plan.

5. Follow-up: metrics and timeline

The report ends with what will be measured, when, and what should raise an alarm. In the example: indexed pages and organic clicks at one month, rankings on the ten priority queries at three months, a new full audit at twelve months. Each metric uses the same source as in part 2, otherwise the comparison is worthless.

What an SEO audit report should not contain

• A tool export pasted as is. Three hundred alerts with the same visual weight hide the three that matter.
• An overall score as the conclusion. A site can score 92 out of 100 and get no traffic at all.
• Recommendations out of reach. Advising a full redesign to a small business with no developer produces a report that ends up in a drawer.
• Untranslated jargon. Every finding must be understandable by the person who controls the budget.

Your pre-audit in report format

Now try it on your own site. Twenty-four checks across three pillars: the tool gives you a pre-report in the same format as the example, with the summary, the score per pillar and the action plan ranked by priority.

How to do an SEO audit: the 6-step method

This is the order in which I run an audit. It does not change from one site to the next, because each step conditions the following one.

1. Record the baseline

Before looking for a single problem, write down where the site stands: organic clicks over the last three months, number of indexed pages, rankings on your ten priority queries, referring domains. This is part 2 of the report, and it is the step almost everyone skips.

2. Check indexing first

In Search Console, open the Page indexing report. Non-indexed pages and their exclusion reasons tell you more than valid pages do. A page Google does not index cannot rank: until that is fixed, the rest of the audit is theoretical.

3. Crawl the whole site

A crawler goes through the site like a bot and reports response codes, tags, page depth, redirects and broken links. For a site under 500 pages, the free version of Screaming Frog is enough. Beyond that, I compared free SEO audit tools and their real limits.

4. Analyze the four pillars

Technical. Can search engines crawl, understand and index the pages? Robots.txt, sitemap, canonicals, redirects, speed, rendering without JavaScript. This is where the most expensive problems hide, and on large sites this block often deserves a full technical SEO audit of its own.

Content. Do the pages cover the topics you want to be found for? Title tags, heading structure, topic coverage compared with the pages that rank, duplicate content, and pages competing for the same keyword, a silent problem that holds back entire sites.

Authority. The backlink profile, domain quality, anchor text, and above all internal linking, the most underused lever because it depends only on you. If the link profile is weak, the logical next step is a link building strategy focused on the pages that matter.

Experience. Readability, calls to action, consistency between search intent and the landing page. I add a section on answer engines: what ChatGPT or Perplexity say about the company when asked about its line of business. The method is detailed in my guide to measuring brand visibility in AI tools.

5. Cross-check your sources

A single tool lies by omission. The crawler sees the whole site but ignores what Google does with it; Search Console sees what Google indexes but not the pages it never found. Cross-checking them reveals what neither shows on its own.

6. Prioritize and write the report

Rate each finding on impact, number of pages affected and effort, then rank in this order:

1. Whatever blocks indexing. As long as a page cannot be indexed, everything else is theoretical.
2. Whatever affects many pages at once. One fixed template improves hundreds of pages in a single change.
3. Whatever concerns your most profitable pages. Pages that convert come before blog posts.
4. The rest, when there is time and budget left.

Then write the report following the five parts above, starting with the summary, even if you write it last.

SEO audit checklist: the 47 points

Here is the grid I work through, in order. It does not replace judgment, but it guarantees no blind spot remains. The points marked as blockers are the ones that make all downstream work useless.

Indexing and crawling: 11 points

1. The site responds over HTTPS, and the HTTP version 301-redirects.
2. Only one version of the domain is accessible, with or without the www prefix.
3. The robots.txt file does not block any resource needed for rendering. Blocker.
4. No strategic page carries a noindex directive. Blocker.
5. The sitemap.xml exists, contains only pages returning a 200 code and is submitted in Search Console.
6. The Page indexing report shows no massive, unexplained exclusions.
7. Canonical tags point to the version to index, without contradicting each other.
8. URL parameters do not generate thousands of crawlable duplicates.
9. No redirect chain goes beyond one hop.
10. Pages returning a 404 error receive no internal links.
11. The main content displays without JavaScript execution.

Performance and technical: 9 points

1. The largest element on screen loads in under 2.5 seconds (LCP).
2. The page responds to clicks in under 200 milliseconds (INP).
3. The page does not shift while loading, images and ads included (CLS under 0.1).
4. Images are served in AVIF or WebP, at the size actually displayed.
5. Every image has width and height attributes.
6. The site is usable with a finger on a phone, without zooming.
7. CSS and JavaScript files are cached properly.
8. No render-blocking resource delays the first paint.
9. Fonts do not cause text to jump while loading.

Content and semantics: 11 points

1. Every page has a unique title tag, under 60 characters, with its keyword at the start.
2. Every page has a hand-written meta description, under 155 characters.
3. Every page has a single H1 that describes its topic.
4. The heading hierarchy is sequential, with no skipped levels.
5. Every page targets one identified primary keyword, and only one.
6. No two pages target the same keyword. Blocker on competitive topics.
7. The content covers the subtopics handled by the pages already ranking.
8. Important pages answer the question in the first few lines.
9. No content is duplicated across several pages of the site.
10. Images carry an alt attribute describing their content.
11. Strategic pages have been updated within the last twelve months.

Structure and internal linking: 8 points

1. No important page is orphaned. Blocker.
2. Strategic pages are three clicks or fewer from the homepage.
3. Internal links connect pages within the same topical cluster.
4. Internal link anchors are descriptive, not "click here".
5. No internal link points to a redirect or an error.
6. The breadcrumb is present and marked up.
7. Pagination and filters do not create crawler traps.
8. Structured data is valid and describes the visible content.

Authority and external signals: 8 points

1. The backlink profile contains no obviously toxic domains.
2. Backlink anchors are varied and natural.
3. The number of referring domains is growing, or at least not falling.
4. Backlinks point to strategic pages, not just the homepage.
5. Broken links pointing to the site are recovered with redirects.
6. The Google Business Profile is complete, with recent reviews.
7. Name, address and phone number are identical across all directories.
8. The brand is mentioned on third-party sites in its industry.

Forty-seven points, four of them marked as blockers. Those four are the ones I check in the first hour, because they make everything else theoretical. For a business that lives on local customers, the last three points deserve their own grid: that is what my local SEO audit checklist is for.

How often should you do an SEO audit?

A full audit once a year is enough for most sites. Three situations call for a new one right away:

• A redesign or a migration. That is when the most things break without anyone noticing: missing redirects, reset canonicals, a staging robots.txt pushed live.
• An unexplained traffic drop. The audit then works as an investigation: algorithm update, indexing problem, a competitor that made a move.
• A change of strategy. New offer, new market, new audience: existing pages no longer necessarily target the right queries.

Between two full audits, a 30-minute monthly check is plenty: index coverage in Search Console, crawl errors, ranking trends on your ten priority queries, new backlinks. This light monitoring catches problems before they get expensive, and it requires no paid tool. On a site that publishes a lot or changes technically every month, add a technical check every six months.

The problems an SEO audit uncovers most often

On most of the sites I analyze, the same defects keep coming back. Here they are, ranked by frequency.

None of these problems is spectacular. That is exactly why they persist: nobody sees them while browsing the site, and they only show up in a systematic analysis.

Do your SEO audit yourself or hire someone?

You can handle the diagnosis on your own: Search Console, the free version of a crawler and the checklist above cover most technical problems. Start there, with the pre-audit on this page.

An outside view becomes useful in three cases: everything is green and traffic is flat, which shifts the problem to content or competition; traffic dropped with no visible cause; or the diagnosis is done but you do not know where to start. What you are buying then is not data, it is a judgment on the order of fixes. Market price ranges and what drives the price of an SEO audit are covered in a dedicated article. My SEO audit ends with this kind of action plan ranked by impact and effort, quoted on request.

Written by

Anthony Courtin

SEO, GEO & AI automation consultant

I help small businesses and independent professionals with their visibility (Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity) and with the real-world use of AI at work. I work on-site with companies to train teams and rethink processes. Everything I write here, I use in client work.

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