How to carry out a detailed SEO audit: We offer a step-by-step guide

• Ryan Walsh
• 17/07/2026
• 10 min read

The key takeaways

An SEO audit means that a comprehensive analysis of the website needs to take place. This means checking the quality and health of the content, backlinks, and the website’s technical aspects such as crawlability and fixing broken links.

AI search visibility is now a massive consideration for many businesses. The reason is that, rather than just relying on organic traffic, direct traffic, social traffic and AdWords, there’s now also AI search to bring in more customers. This means more businesses than ever want their brand mentioned on, say, ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Perplexity.

Technical SEO is often a fundamental part of any SEO audit. It should cover key areas such as website speed, website indexing and also whether key areas such as meta titles could be missing or rewritten.

E-E-A-T evaluation often requires the skill set of a real human, rather than relying on marketing tools. Does the website give the impression and content that shows a real expert has written and created the work?

Marketing tools: make use of leading marketing tools, such as Google Search Console, Page Speed Insights, and Screaming Frog.

Organic traffic

According to a comprehensive study by Ahrefs, a whopping 96.55% of content marketing receives no organic traffic from Google at all.

Therefore, we recommend that your audit report includes an evaluation of the organic traffic received by key pages.

This will give you a simple overview of how many people are visiting those pages from the Google SERP’s. You should evaluate whether certain pages need to be updated. Perhaps the page could do with some higher-quality content marketing added to improve the Google E-E-A-T score, thereby helping bring in more organic visitors.

What are the benefits of carrying out an SEO audit?

Just as a vehicle often needs an inspection from time to time, so does a company’s website via an in-depth audit. This helps flag problems and also recognises areas that could be improved even further. You could, for example, spot that the company’s backlink profile is spammy and take the necessary action to fix this after an audit has been carried out.

Common issues often raised revolve around on-page and technical SEO faults. Not to mention the content marketing sometimes can flag a range of issues, for example, duplication issues, AI text issues, as well as pages which are content-thin.

By carrying out an SEO audit, you can sometimes notice the following

Content Refresh Opportunities

After a recent Google core update, you may have noticed that a whole bunch of content marketing that once ranked high no longer does.

Therefore, perhaps the content marketing needs to be refreshed and updated?

For example, multiple buying guides that suggest products you no longer stock should be refreshed and replaced with products that you now stock.

 

Technical SEO issues

It’s possible to notice that your company website is running slower than normal through carrying out an in-depth audit. This could be causing speed issues, resulting in an elevated bounce rate.

Both of these factors will hold your search engine optimisation back.

 

UX and user experience signals

Sometimes a business, for example, an e-commerce business, introduces a web design which makes the website easier to use for the customer. This simplicity in finding products, as well as offering a good user experience (U.X), can mean that such businesses generate far higher dwell times. This can also result in much better rate of returning shoppers.

For example, Amazon offers a really good user experience across its website. The reason is that the company will have spent considerable time improving its web design to make it very easy for customers to find the right products through designing for example simple to use main menus.

 

Why are the competitors outranking you?

An SEO audit shouldn’t just rely on the results that are fed by an automated tool. The best audits will include input from an experienced SEO consultant. This way, you can manually evaluate, for example, why a business or several businesses may be outranking you.

For example, you might spot the additional service pages are needed and wish to integrate such work into your own website.

 

Keyword implementation

You should evaluate how well keywords have been applied across your website. Have they been applied correctly to the main pages, including page titles and meta descriptions?

Backlink quality

Perhaps we have saved the best for last, but one of the most important aspects to check is the quality of backlinks. If the quality of the backlinks is not high enough, this could be causing a large SEO issue.

 

What marketing tools will we need?

In terms of marketing tools, you will need the following:

• A backlink checking tool
• Keyword research tool
• A tool to spot on-page SEO issues
• Tools such as UberSuggest, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog are all popular tools used by marketing companies all across the world.

 

Google Analytics

The key SEO metrics, the fundamentals if you like, are monitoring organic traffic, backlinks and CTR. All of this can be checked using two important tools: Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These marketing tools offer reliable data, which is key to tracking the success of your business’s search engine optimisation.

Keyword research tools and Uber suggest

When optimising any website, you need to know which keywords you are optimising it for. For example, which long-tail keywords will bring in the most organic traffic? Many businesses use Uber Suggest.

What is the most commonly used marketing tool?

Sometimes SEO tools are geared towards a particular size of business. However, one exception to that rule is Google Search Console. The reason is that this tool can be used by very large businesses as well as small businesses as well.

We use this tool daily because it allows us to track where keywords are ranking accurately. We would also recommend using Google’s Core

Web Vitals and Google Analytics. All of these are essential tools for tracking whether your business’s search engine optimisation is on the right track for success.

 

How to perform an SEO audit

Google’s algorithm is very complex. In fact, Googlebot is constantly crawling and indexing business websites to calculate and measure the strength of over 200 ranking factors. An in-depth SEO audit can uncover a weakness in one or many of these ranking factors, such as excessive duplicate content.

Where do you begin carrying out an SEO audit?

Run a website crawl

Although the various SEO tools are no replacement for an actual experienced SEO consultant, they are still very useful.

Tools from companies like Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, and SEMrush can all be used to spot strengths and weaknesses in a business’s search engine optimisation. For example, it could become apparent that across hundreds of pages, you are missing meta titles. Because of this, the CTR is very low.

Analyse the business’s organic traffic (Use Google Analytics for this)

Organic search, or the “Organic SERP’s” is where businesses generate sales from free traffic. Therefore, the business must analyse its organic traffic: is it increasing?

Has it declined? If so, it’s then a matter of researching which Google algorithm updates were rolled out around that time. A significant Google core update was rolled out, targeting content-thin pages.

Based on your website’s pages, is there an issue with thin content pages?

Start with the simple things, such as meta titles and meta descriptions.

Use tools such as Screaming Frog, which is an excellent tool for analysing on-page SEO en masse. Such tools could identify a range of relatively simple on-page problems, such as broken internal links. These meta titles are too long or lead to redirect loops that waste your business’s crawl budget.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, perhaps break the tasks into more manageable pieces.

For example, perhaps start with the H1 titles. Are any missing? Could these be better optimised in line with white-hat best practices?
Keyword cannibalisation issues

Cannibalisation occurs when a website creates multiple pages targeting the same keyword. For example, let’s say you retail construction equipment, and you sell a particular cement mixer. If you have multiple pages selling the same product, Google often doesn’t know which is the main product page. This can mean that a competitor with better and stronger on-page SEO ranks higher.

Googlebot and indexation issues

Common indexation issues include:

404 errors

Some pages, such as old product pages, are sometimes deleted without consideration of where the shopper will move to next. These are called broken links, which cause 404-page errors. Without the proper implementation of 301 redirects, the goodwill of the page’s authority is lost.

This is not to mention the negative user experience of sending a shopper to a page that no longer exists.

 

Server errors

Server errors, believe it or not, can actually break a business.

Imagine, for a second, an actual shop on the high street; imagine it randomly opens and closes when it wants. Shoppers travel perhaps some distance to find that, for no reason, the shutters are down, and there is no sign of when the shop will reopen.

Shoppers naturally get annoyed, go elsewhere, and buy what they want with more ease.

Well, the same goes for server errors: if the website’s down too often, you’ll not only lose sales but also create a negative user experience.

 

Broken redirects or redirect loops

Businesses of all sizes have only a set, allocated crawl budget.

This is not something all businesses consider; however, the very best SEO companies often consider how to use the company’s crawl budget most effectively and avoid wasting it.

 

Duplicate content

Duplicate content will damage a website’s overall quality score. It will also cause other issues, such as cannibalisation and wasting the company’s crawl budget.

Thin or empty pages

Thin content pages are a large issue that many businesses face. For example, imagine an e-commerce business; it could quite easily have over 1000 pages.

Writing all the content for those pages is a large task, requiring a lot of time.

This is why businesses often write short paragraphs, or perhaps have a low word count across the page. This is what is called a “content-thin” page. Once again, this could cause a wide range of SEO issues. The most apparent is that Google often can’t fathom what the page’s purpose is or what it is selling.

Therefore, on pages where the text has been manually written and a lot of effort has gone into quality advice, these pages tend to rank much higher.

We would recommend using marketing tools to detect duplicated pages. This is a very common problem, especially with e-commerce websites. We would therefore dedicate a lot of time to detecting duplication issues and rectifying these issues.

Your SEO consultant may suggest different ways to fix duplication issues. For example, they may suggest setting up 301 page redirects and also use something called “canonical tags”.

Canonical tags simply tell Googlebot which version of the page to index.

Check Page Speed across your website

The largest e-commerce businesses in the world invest a lot of time and money into making sure their e-commerce stores run as fast as possible. They know that if you hold the customer up for longer than you should, they will go elsewhere.
Therefore, no matter if you own a large e-commerce store or perhaps you run a small business, you make your website as fast as you possibly can.

Slow load times simply frustrate the shopper, so much so that the bounce rate can elevate sharply if the website becomes too slow. Not just that, sales will be impacted, as a frustrated shopper, who’s annoyed with how slow the website is, is likely to leave the website.

Google PageSpeed Insights

The Google Page Speed Insights tool is an excellent tool for measuring how fast your website is. Another commonly used tool is GTMetrix, this is very simple to use, simple measures the web pages score and presents a scoring.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Top web designers and marketing agencies should consider Core Web Vitals when designing a website. The reason being is, if a website can be faster, on mobile and desktop then the SEO will already have a strong advantage.

Google’s Page Speed Insights report

Its important to use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to see which and if pages need improving.

Analyse Mobile Friendliness

It sounds like very simple advice, however, it’s important to have a mobile friendly website. If the design is not user friendly, for example, perhaps on smartphones the menu is very difficult to use, this will cause you as a business to lose sales. This can become apparent when there’s a very strong bounce rate on the mobile version of the website. This could become clear after an SEO audit.

A very high bounce rate on the mobile version of the website, combined with a low dwell time, this is a strong indication that perhaps the mobile design does need

 

Fix broken links

A good SEO audit should highlight broken links. Now, depending on the marketing tool your using, you might want to analyse broken links internally and externally.

Internal links
Internal links are much easier to fix, as you can spot the pages which have the broken and then redirect the link. In most CMS this is a piece of cake to do, for example using WordPress Dashboard this is a straightforward fix.

However, when you use quality tools, such as Moz Pro, you can then have a list of broken external links. These are sometimes referred to as “lost links” these can be harder to fix, because the link will be coming from another business.

These two different types of links, cause different issues. For example, the internal link can cause issues for Googlebot as it cant crawl and index the page.

The external link being lost, means that depending on the quality and the importance of the link this will impact your organic search engine optimisation. The businesses that are ranked say 1st place in the organic search engine results, what these normaly have is thousands of quality high DA backlinks.

 

A competitive analysis

Its important to undertake a competitive analysis of your direct competitors search engine optimisation. For example, what areas are they particularly strong in?

For example, do they have a particularly strong backlink profile, perhaps a large accumulation of high DA links. This strong backlink profile could be strong competitive advantage for those businesses. Therefore, written into the SEO audit, you do need to detail and have a think about how you can counter where your direct competitors are particularly strong.

Then we would recommend auditing the following:

The keywords that your competitors rank for in comparison to your business

• Number of backlinks, and link quality
• Social media engagement
• How fast your competitors’ websites are comparison to how fast your e-commerce website it
• Mobile responsiveness
• Content marketing quality
• How frequently are they adding new content?

A detailed backlink analysis

Its important to use a tool, such as Majestic or perhaps use SEM Rush, and to analyse in detail your competitors backlinks.

You should ask the following questions:

• How many backlinks do they have?
• How good quality are those links?
• How many high DA backlinks do they have
• Is the backlink profile diversified, meaning from a wide cross section of different businesses
• Is the anchor text varied and in a white hat way
• Have the backlinks been accumulated over perhaps a long and sustained period
• Which backlinks particularly standout as being strong, and can you as a business replicate those links?

Sitemap and site structure

Just as a building will be carefully designed and planned, so should the architecture of your company website.

Good website architecture, will allow you to target the right keywords.

For example, it allows you to target more keywords, if you have dedicated pages for each service. This will mean that you can they apply top quality on-page optimisation work.

 

Are there areas where your direct competitors are particular weak?

What the leading marketing agencies do, is they often spot weaknesses in regards to your direct competitors search engine optimisation.

For example, within a large e-commerce website, there could be some products that are not that well optimised.

This gives you a fantastic opportunity to optimise the e-commerce website for those terms.

Therefore, perhaps you could build more links to those pages, you could write more content marketing and improve the on-page SEO in that area. Then you could make your own e-commerce website strong in that area, leap-frogging the competition, and gaining more sales.

Therefore, part of an SEO audit is not just looking for technical SEO areas to improve, sometimes its also about spotting business opportunities.

Structured data (schema.org markup)

Structured data is widely used by many e-commerce businesses. What it allows, is for your product to be displayed in Google’s SERP’s as what SEO consultants refer to as a “rich snippet”.

This means that whatever the product is, it can then appear next to say a star rating in the SERP’s. What this really does, is it can grab the shopper’s interest. For example, when they are presented with lets say 10 organic business listings, the featured snippet will leap out at the page. Now, we would recommend working with your web developer to add featured snippets.

Evaluate E-E-A-T Signals

A top agency, some of the best agencies in the entire land, they will now know that to rank right at the top of Google’s organic results, you need to have a very high E-E-A-T score.

Now for those that haven’t got a clue what this means, its Google’s quality raters way of evaluating how strong a piece of content marketing is. Regardless of what helpful information is written, Google wants to understand how much experience and expertise you have in that area.

So, whether your writing about a new cordless drill, or a new diamond ring, Google algorithm wants to know how much of an expert you are on that product or service. The businesses, that’s the e-commerce businesses with the strongest E-E-A-T scores will rank at the top of Google’s SERPs.

Heres some the things that you should consider in an E-E-A-T audit

To improve your businesses E-E-A-T score you should do the following

Author bios

Add details about the author, and also link to their LinkedIn account as well

About us page

Do add an about us page to your website to give more details about the business. Also mention for example key staff, and then link out to again their LinkedIn or perhaps staff pages

Expertise

The work that Google’s algorithm ranks very high, is the work where the author can show they are an expert on that product. For example, in our industry, if the articles are really in-depth and the author shows that they have very strong SEO knowledge, these articles rank higher.

 

External citations

If you link out to your sources, this can help Google’s algorithm check if the blog post is offering quality and very helpful advice. For example, lets say that its clear you’ve really researched what you’re writing about. You’ve added a lot of statistics and facts, and you have linked out to where you have conducted research.

This helps Google’s algorithm to work out if the information offers helpful advice.

YMYL content

This again would need an SEO consultant to offer and lend their advice. However, if your business is offering advice that is deemed YMYL content, i.e offering health or finance or lets say legal advice, the work then needs to be accurate and kept up to date.

The reason being is YMYL content is content marketing, where shoppers will be making important decisions after reading the work. For example, if the page is offering advice on say mortgages, then this information could be used by shoppers to base very important financial decisions on.

Therefore, this work, it needs to be accurate, and also kept up to date. The reason is, the YMYL content marketing is content that needs to super reliable. If for example your taking health advice from the page, it needs to be accurate. This is why Google’s algorithm, will use Google

Knowledge Grapth to make sure that the information is accurate.

Auditing your businesses backlink profile

If you’re wondering what a backlink profile is, it’s simply a list of other websites which link directly to one of your main pages or perhaps a blog post. These links get crawled and also indexed by Googlebot, now if the links come from an important website, such as Bloomberg News, the DA score will be high.

Now because that DA score of “Domain Authority” is high, this means that more link juice is set through to that page. Now, its widely thought by some of the best marketing businesses in the whole world, that the pages which have a lot of high domain authority links, well these pages often rank higher in the SERP’s.

However, so many marketing business, and the actual companies themselves build spam and also toxic links.

These can massively damage your organic rankings over the long term.

When auditing your company’s backlinks, do the following:

Toxic or spammy links

If your business links to a lot of low authority referring domains, has too many spammy and toxic links this could be a problem. Just as high

DA links move organic rankings up, low quality links do the exact opposite and can move a businesses organic ranking down.

Lost backlinks

Sometimes a business will be ranked right at the top of Google for highly competitive keywords.

Sometimes the business will enjoy being ranked number 1 and sometimes that stays that way for some time.

However, nothing stays the same forever. What we mean by that statement is, backlinks are constantly being deleted and the link can become lost. Now, if a business was to say get a bit complacent and lose say a lot of links with high DA score all at once, well this can have a negative impact on the businesses rankings.

Those backlinks with a high DA score, well they are like pillars holding the websites SEO up. If a few get removed, or too many, then organic rankings will simply start to move down. This is why SEO retainers are charged for on a monthly basis. This allows the agency to work on improving and strengthening the backlink profile on a monthly basis.

 

Link diversity

What you don’t want is all your backlinks coming from just one place.

Equally you don’t want all your backlinks coming from just a few placed.

You want backlink diversity, now to obtain that, what you want is good quality links coming from a wide range of different businesses.

You want the backlinks to be:

From high quality websites

High DA score

Diversified anchor text

Conclusion

Walsh & Partners have conducted SEO audits on brochure websites and e-commerce websites as well.

We have a really good team of SEO experts working for us, we have some of the best SEO knowledge in our city.

Therefore, do chat to Ryan Walsh and we will see how we can help your business to generate more sales.