SEO Audit Checklist.

Nothing else matters until these four are right.

• robots.txt does not block anything you want indexedOpen yoursite.com/robots.txt. A stray Disallow: / left over from a staging site is the single most expensive typo in SEO.
• No accidental noindex on live pagesView source and search for noindex. WordPress has a Discourage search engines setting that survives a launch more often than anyone admits.
• Your key pages are actually indexedIn Search Console, run URL Inspection on your five most important pages. Indexed is the only acceptable answer.Google Search Console
• An XML sitemap exists and is submittedIt should list live, canonical, indexable URLs only. Redirects and 404s in a sitemap teach Google to trust it less.

How the site is organised, which is what most audits skip.

• One page per topic, no two pages competingSearch your own site for your main term with site:yoursite.com. If three pages come back, they are splitting the same signal three ways.
• URLs are readable and stableShort, lowercase, hyphenated, no dates you will regret. Changing them later costs you every link that pointed at the old one.
• Important pages are linked from other pagesA page reachable only from the sitemap is a page you have told search engines not to care about.
• Breadcrumbs on anything nestedThey help people and they give search engines the hierarchy without guessing.
• Canonical tags point at the right versionEvery page should declare itself canonical unless it is a genuine duplicate. Self-referencing canonicals are correct and normal.
• Paginated and filtered pages are handledFaceted navigation can generate thousands of near-identical URLs. Decide which ones deserve indexing before Google decides for you.

The elements a search engine reads first.

• Every page has a unique title tagAround 50 to 60 characters, the primary term near the front, written for a human deciding whether to click.
• Meta descriptions are written, not generatedThey are not a ranking factor and they are absolutely a click-through factor. Google rewrites them often, which is not a reason to leave them empty.
• One H1 per page, and it matches the title's intentHeadings below it descend in order. Do not pick a heading level for its font size.
• The page answers the query it targets in the first screenSearch your target term, read the top three results, and check whether your page does the same job. If they are all comparison pages and yours is a service page, format is your problem, not word count.
• No thin or duplicated pages left overLocation pages that differ only by city name, tag archives with one post, old campaign pages. Merge, improve or remove them.
• Images have real alt textDescribe the image for someone who cannot see it. Keyword stuffing in alt text helps nobody and hurts accessibility.

Measured on mobile, on a real connection, not on your laptop.

• Run PageSpeed Insights on your top three pagesRead the field data at the top before the lab score. Field data is what real visitors experienced, the lab score is a simulation.PageSpeed Insights
• Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 secondsUsually the hero image or the web font. Preload the one, subset the other, and stop shipping a 2MB JPEG.
• Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1Set width and height on images, reserve space for ads and embeds, and do not inject banners above existing content.
• Interaction to Next Paint under 200msThis is where heavy third-party scripts show up. Every tag you add to a tag manager has a cost somebody pays.
• Images are modern formats and correctly sizedWebP or AVIF, sized to their display size, lazy loaded below the fold.

The checks that only surface when something is already wrong.

• HTTPS everywhere, with no mixed contentOne HTTP image on an HTTPS page is enough to break the padlock.
• One canonical hostname, everything else redirects oncewww or not, http to https, trailing slash or not. Pick one of each and 301 the rest, in a single hop.
• Broken internal links fixedSearch Console's Pages report lists what it found. Fix the links, do not just redirect the symptoms.
• The mobile experience is the real experienceGoogle indexes the mobile version. If content is hidden on mobile, treat it as content that does not exist.
• Structured data validatesOrganization and WebSite at minimum, plus whatever fits the page: Product, FAQPage, Article, LocalBusiness.Rich Results Test
• Language and region targeting is correct, if you use ithreflang has to be reciprocal. Half-implemented hreflang is worse than none at all.

The parts you influence rather than control.

• Google Business Profile is complete and currentFor anyone with a location or a service area, this outranks most on-page work for local queries.Google Business Profile
• Name, address and phone match everywhereWebsite, Google, directories, social profiles. Inconsistency here is a quiet tax.
• You know where your existing links come fromSearch Console's Links report is free and enough to start. You cannot plan link building without knowing what you already have.
• Your brand name returns you firstIf it does not, that is the first thing to fix, before any competitive term is worth chasing.