Most SEO audits fail the same way stack audits do: they produce a 60-page document that nobody acts on. The point of an audit isn't completeness — it's a short, ordered list of things to fix.
This runs in five passes. Do them in order, because each one's findings change what matters in the next. Budget an afternoon for a small site.
Pass 1 — Can search engines reach your pages? #
Nothing else matters if this is broken. A perfectly optimised page that can't be crawled is invisible.
Check robots.txt
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Look for Disallow: rules blocking anything important. This file is the single most common place a site accidentally hides itself.
Check your sitemap
Visit yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Verify: it exists, it's valid XML, it lists your real pages, and it doesn't list dead or redirected ones. Confirm it's referenced in robots.txt.
Confirm pages are server-rendered
View source (not inspect element) on a key page. If you see your actual content in the raw HTML, you're fine. If you see an empty <div> and a JavaScript bundle, your content may depend on rendering that search engines handle inconsistently.
Check for real links
Navigation built from <button> elements with JavaScript handlers instead of <a href> links is invisible to crawlers. Your site can look perfectly navigable to humans and be a dead end to a crawler.
Look at Search Console coverage
Google Search Console → Pages. This tells you what Google has actually indexed versus what it's excluded, and why. It's the most direct answer available to “is my site being crawled properly.”
Check for redirect chains
A URL that redirects to a URL that redirects again dilutes signal and slows crawling. Every redirect should be a single hop.
Pass 2 — On-page fundamentals #
Now the pages themselves. For each important page:
Title tag
Present, unique, under ~60 characters, contains the target keyword. Watch for accidental duplication (many CMS templates append the site name to a title that already contains it).
Meta description
Present, unique, under ~155 characters. It doesn't directly affect ranking, but it heavily affects click-through, and a description that gets truncated mid-sentence costs you clicks.
Exactly one H1
Matching the page's actual subject. Zero H1s and multiple H1s are both problems.
Logical heading hierarchy
H2s under the H1, H3s under H2s. Don't skip levels for styling reasons.
Canonical tag
Present and pointing at the correct URL. Wrong canonicals silently de-index pages.
Image alt text
Descriptive for meaningful images, empty (alt="") for decorative ones. Both matter; the second is often done wrong by omission.
One page per keyword
If three pages target the same term, they compete with each other. Pick one, and point the others at it internally.
Pass 3 — Technical health #
Core Web Vitals
Run PageSpeed Insights on your key pages, and check Search Console's Core Web Vitals report for real-user field data (more reliable than lab tests). The three metrics: LCP (loading), INP (interactivity), CLS (visual stability).
Mobile rendering
Google indexes mobile-first. Check that the viewport meta tag exists and that pages actually work at phone width — not just that they technically load.
HTTPS everywhere
Confirm no mixed content (HTTP resources loading on an HTTPS page).
Font loading
Fonts are render-blocking. Count how many families and weights you're loading. Sites frequently load fonts they no longer use — an easy LCP win.
Structured data
Check for schema markup and validate it in Google's Rich Results Test. At minimum: Organization on the homepage, Article on blog posts, FAQPage anywhere you have an FAQ section. FAQPage in particular is free markup on content you've already written.
Broken links
Internal 404s waste crawl budget and frustrate users. External broken links signal staleness.
Pass 4 — Content and intent #
The pass most technical audits skip, and often where the actual problem lives.
Does each page match search intent?
Search your target keyword and look at what ranks. If the top ten results are all comparison listicles and your page is a product page, you won't rank — not because the page is bad, but because it answers a different question than the one being asked.
Is the content substantive?
Compare depth against what's ranking. Thin pages don't rank when competitors have covered the topic properly.
Is anything cannibalising?
Search site:yourdomain.com [keyword]. More than one page competing for the same term means you're splitting your own signal.
Are there orphan pages?
Pages with no internal links pointing to them are hard to discover and signal low importance. Every page should be reachable from somewhere.
Is internal anchor text descriptive?
“Learn more” passes no signal. “Sales pipeline stages” does.
Is anything stale?
Content citing outdated data or years-old context erodes trust. Update or remove.
Pass 5 — AI visibility #
Newer, and increasingly worth checking. A growing share of research happens inside AI answer engines rather than on a results page.
Ask the question directly
Put your target queries to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. Are you cited? Is a competitor?
Check whether you're citable
Answer engines favour content that states things clearly and factually, with structure they can parse. Clear headings, direct answers near the top of a section, and specific facts rather than vague claims all help.
Check your entity consistency
Company name, address, and legal entity should match exactly across your site, schema markup, and external listings. Inconsistency weakens how well any system — search or AI — recognises you as a coherent entity.
Fixing: what order #
The audit produces a list. Order it like this:
First — anything blocking indexing. A robots.txt block or a broken canonical outranks every other issue on the list. These are usually quick fixes with disproportionate impact.
Second — broken things. 404s, redirect chains, missing titles.
Third — high-traffic pages. Fix your best pages before your worst. Improvement compounds where there's already traffic.
Fourth — intent mismatches. These need rewriting rather than tweaking, so they're slower, but they're often what's actually holding a page back.
Fifth — everything else.
Set a re-audit date. Sites drift. Quarterly is reasonable for most; monthly if you're publishing frequently.
A note on tooling #
You can run every check above manually — Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, view-source, and a spreadsheet will get you there. For a ten-page site, that's genuinely fine.
It stops scaling around the point where you're auditing regularly, across more pages than you want to click through, and where the fix list needs to be shared with people who won't read raw output. That's the point to automate it.
The SEO auditor is part of Marketing. Paste a URL and it crawls the site, scores it across five pillars, pulls live Core Web Vitals from Google PageSpeed for mobile and desktop, checks whether AI answer engines cite you or a rival, and exports the report as a shareable PDF. Rhenyx puts agents to work across marketing and sales — Marketing and Sales CRM are live today. See how it works →