This list covers what a search engine sees. If you want the wider version — speed, mobile, security, whether customers can contact you — that is the full website audit checklist. This page goes deeper on search specifically.
Work through it in order. The first group can invalidate everything below it: there is no point perfecting your headings on a page Google has been told to ignore.
Group 1 — Indexing: can Google reach your pages?
Four checks. If any of them fails, fix it before reading further.
1. Is the site in the index at all?
Search site:yourdomain.com. No results means nothing else on this page matters yet — go to why a site does not show up on Google.
2. Is robots.txt blocking anything important?
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Disallow: / blocks the whole site. Check that nothing blocks your stylesheets or scripts either — a search engine that cannot load your CSS cannot tell whether the page works on a phone.
3. Is anything carrying a noindex tag by accident?
A page can be perfectly crawlable and still carry an instruction not to store it. This is the one that survives a robots.txt check and quietly removes your best pages. Search Console reports it under Pages → Excluded by "noindex" tag.
4. Does a sitemap exist and is it submitted?
You want a sitemap at a predictable address, listing the pages you want indexed and nothing else, referenced from robots.txt and submitted in Search Console. A sitemap listing redirects, 404s and pages you have marked noindex is worse than none — it is a list of instructions that contradict each other.
Group 2 — On-page: do your pages say what they are about?
5. Does every page have a unique title?
Roughly 50–60 characters, containing the words someone would search for, different on every page. "Home" is not a title. Neither is the same company name repeated across forty pages.
6. Does every page have a written meta description?
About 150 characters. It is not a ranking factor and it absolutely is a click factor — it is the sales copy under your link. Leave it blank and Google writes one from your page, usually badly.
7. Exactly one h1 per page?
One main heading that states the subject. Not the logo, not a strapline.
8. Do subheadings descend in order?
h2 under h1, h3 under h2, without skipping. Both search engines and screen readers use this to understand structure.
9. Do your headings contain the words people search for?
Naturally. "Our services" tells nobody anything; "Emergency boiler repair in Kingston" is both a better heading and a better answer.
10. Do images have alt text?
Describing what is in the image, for someone who cannot see it. This is an accessibility requirement first and a Google Images opportunity second. Decorative images should have empty alt text, not a keyword.
11. Is there enough on the page to rank?
There is no magic word count. There is a question: does this page fully answer what somebody arriving from a search wanted to know? A service page with two sentences does not.
12. Are you saying the same thing on several pages?
Three near-identical location pages compete with each other and none of them wins. Either make them genuinely different or merge them into one good page.
Group 3 — Technical: is anything in the way?
13. Does one canonical version of the site exist?
With and without www, http and https — one should serve the site and the other three should redirect to it permanently. Four live copies is four pages competing for the same rankings.
14. Do your pages declare a canonical URL?
A tag on each page stating its one official address. It is what stops the same content at /page, /page/, and /page?utm_source=newsletter being treated as three pages.
15. Is the certificate valid and not expiring?
Https, matching the domain, and more than thirty days left. An expired certificate does not lower your ranking gracefully — it puts a full-page browser warning in front of every visitor.
16. Are redirects permanent, and do they go straight to the destination?
Use 301, not 302, for anything that has genuinely moved. And check for chains: A redirecting to B redirecting to C wastes crawl budget and loses a little of the signal at each hop.
17. Are there broken internal links?
Links to pages that no longer exist, usually left behind by a redesign. They waste crawling and they irritate readers.
18. Does the site work on a phone?
Mobile-first indexing means the mobile version is the version being ranked — not the desktop one. If your phone layout is a cut-down afterthought, that cut-down version is what Google judges.
19. Is it reasonably fast?
A mild ranking signal and a strong conversion one. See Core Web Vitals explained for what is actually measured, and why websites are slow for the causes.
20. Is there structured data, and does it match the page?
Markup describing what the page is — a business, an article, a product — so a search engine can show a richer result. One rule: never describe something in structured data that is not visible on the page. Marking up reviews or FAQs that a visitor cannot see is a policy breach, and the penalty applies site-wide rather than to the one page.
Group 4 — Off-page and content
21. Does anything link to you?
Links from other sites remain among the strongest signals. Start with places you have a legitimate claim to be listed: trade associations, your chamber of commerce, suppliers' stockist pages, local press, anything you sponsor. Do not buy links.
22. Have you claimed your Google Business Profile?
For any local business this frequently matters more than the website. The map pack sits above the ordinary results and is driven by the profile, not the site. It is free and it takes twenty minutes.
23. Do your pages target things people actually search for?
The most common finding on a small business site is a set of pages optimised for words the business uses internally rather than the words customers type. "Bespoke fenestration solutions" is not a search. "Double glazing repair" is.
How to prioritise what you find
- Indexing problems. Everything else is theoretical until these are fixed.
- Duplicate versions of the site. Cheap to fix, and it consolidates rankings you already have rather than chasing new ones.
- Titles and descriptions on your most important pages. Hours of work, affects every impression.
- Thin or duplicated content on pages that matter commercially.
- Speed and technical polish.
- Links and content — the slowest to pay off, which is why they should be started earliest and treated as ongoing rather than as a project.
The uncomfortable truth about SEO audits is that the audit is the easy part. Almost everything on this list is checkable in an afternoon by someone who has never done it before. What separates sites that rank from sites that do not is which of these findings actually get fixed, and whether anyone keeps writing after the audit is filed.