SEO Audit Checklist

Restate the ICP and the buyer-journey stage this audit serves — TOFU education vs. BOFU comparison content draws very different keyword sets. Pull last quarter's persona doc; don't redo persona work here.

Export the last 16 months of GSC queries (impressions > 50) and overlay Ahrefs Keywords Explorer for volume, KD, and SERP features. Filter brand terms into a separate tab — they distort opportunity sizing.

Group into informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional buckets. Use Surfer or Clearscope SERP analysis to confirm intent — Google's results page tells you the intent more reliably than the query string does.

One primary keyword per URL — keyword cannibalization is the single most common cause of mid-audit ranking drops. Flag clusters where two or more URLs target the same head term and queue them for consolidation.

Lead with the primary keyword, follow with a benefit modifier, end with the brand name. Test rendering with the Mangools SERP simulator — Google rewrites titles aggressively when they exceed pixel width.

Target 140-160 characters with a clear value prop and an action verb. Meta descriptions don't directly affect rankings, but they drive CTR which feeds into ranking signals. Skip duplicates — Screaming Frog will flag them in its export.

One H1 per page, H2/H3 nesting that mirrors content structure. Common gotcha: the CMS theme wraps the logo in an H1 — fix at the template level, not the page level.

Each cluster post should link to its pillar with the pillar's target keyword as anchor text. Aim for 3-5 contextual internal links per 1,500 words. Avoid sitewide footer links — Google discounts them heavily.

Descriptive alt text serves accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA) and image search. Compress to WebP under 200KB; hero images over 1MB are the single biggest LCP offender on most marketing sites.

Faceted URLs, UTM-tagged variants, and printer-friendly versions all need self-referencing or pointing canonicals. Pagination and category archives are the usual offenders.

Configure to render JavaScript and respect robots.txt. For sites over 500K URLs, switch to Sitebulb or Lumar — Screaming Frog's memory model gets unhappy. Export the issues report as the foundation for triage.

Major = noindex on revenue pages, broken canonicals, server errors, redirect chains over 3 hops. Minor = missing alt text, long titles, thin pages. None = crawl is clean. Severity drives whether the dev team gets pulled in this sprint.

Open Jira tickets per error class with the affected URL list, the expected behavior, and the GSC coverage report screenshot. Tag P1 for anything blocking indexing of revenue pages.

Targets: LCP < 2.5s, INP < 200ms, CLS < 0.1. Pull field data from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX) — lab-only Lighthouse scores don't reflect what real users see. INP replaced FID in March 2024.

Sitemap should include only canonical, indexable URLs that return 200. Robots.txt must not block CSS/JS — Google needs them to render. Submit the sitemap in GSC and confirm the 'Discovered' count matches your published URL count.

Article, Product, FAQ, Breadcrumb, and Organization schema are the high-leverage types. Validate via Google's Rich Results Test plus Schema.org validator. Watch for FAQ rich results — Google deprecated most of them in 2023, so don't promise SERP real estate that no longer exists.

Every HTTP variant should 301 to its HTTPS equivalent — single hop, no chains through www/non-www variants. Check expiration date and add a calendar reminder 30 days before renewal.

Review Domain Rating trend, referring domain growth, and anchor text distribution. Sudden DR spikes paired with foreign-language anchor text are usually negative SEO attempts or scraped link drops.

Look for PBN footprints, link farms, and spammy directories. Google ignores most low-quality links automatically — disavow only when there's clear evidence of a manual action risk or unnatural pattern. Aggressive disavowing of legitimate links has hurt more sites than it has helped.

Submit the disavow file (one domain or URL per line, comments prefixed with #) via the GSC disavow tool. Keep a versioned copy — re-uploading replaces the prior file in full.

Run Ahrefs Link Intersect on the top 3-5 organic competitors. Filter for DR 30+ referring domains they share that you don't. Hand the prospect list to PR or content for outreach with a specific asset to pitch.

Mark demo-request, content-download, and signup events as key events (formerly conversions). Validate they fire on actual submit — not on email-blur or page-view — using the GA4 DebugView. Mis-mapped events are the most common cause of 5x-inflated reported conversions.

Looker Studio or the in-house BI tool. Required tiles: organic sessions trend, top 20 ranking keywords, GSC click-through rate by query, conversions from organic, Core Web Vitals pass rate. Share the link with the marketing team channel.

Calendar a follow-up Screaming Frog crawl plus a GSC coverage delta review for 30 days out. Most on-page changes show ranking impact in the 4-12 week window — re-crawl confirms the technical fixes stuck through CMS deploys.