Skip to content
seo.bargains

How-to guide · 5 steps

How to Do an SEO Audit (Full Website Audit Guide)

An SEO audit is a systematic review of everything affecting a website's search performance — technical health, on-page signals, backlink profile, and content quality. It sounds daunting but with the right tools, a solid audit takes a few hours and produces a clear action list. Here's a process to follow.

Turning audit findings into an action plan

  • High impact Expected impact, Low effort Effort to fix: Do nowHigh impact, quick fixes such as indexing blockers.
  • High impact Expected impact, High effort Effort to fix: PlanHigh impact projects such as site structure or speed work.
  • Low impact Expected impact, Low effort Effort to fix: BatchSmall tidy-ups to group into one session.
  • Low impact Expected impact, High effort Effort to fix: DeferLow value and costly; revisit later.
The final step of this guide: sort every finding by impact and effort so the audit ends in a short, ordered to-do list.

  1. Step 1: Run a technical crawl to find structural issues

    Start every SEO audit with a full technical crawl. This surfaces broken links, redirect errors, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and crawl depth issues — all the foundational problems that prevent your other SEO work from being effective.

    Tool for this stepSemrush

    from $139/mo

    Semrush's Site Audit checks a long list of technical SEO issues and groups them by severity, so you know where to start.

    Semrush plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Seobility (from €59.90/mo)

  2. Step 2: Audit your backlink profile for toxic links

    Pull your full backlink profile and look for red flags: links from spammy sites, irrelevant foreign-language sites, link networks, and sites with toxic anchor text. Most sites never need to disavow; reserve the Disavow tool for severe cases such as known paid or manipulative links.

    Tool for this stepSemrush

    from $139/mo

    Semrush's Backlink Audit flags potentially harmful referring domains and can export a disavow file for you to review before submitting it to Google.

    Semrush plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Moz Pro (from $99/mo)

  3. Step 3: Assess on-page SEO for your most important pages

    Review title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, and content quality for your top 20 pages by traffic and revenue. Check for: missing or duplicate titles, keyword misalignment, thin content, and missing internal links.

    Tool for this stepSemrush

    from $139/mo

    Semrush's On Page SEO Checker generates prioritised on-page recommendations for each page, using competitor data to suggest improvements.

    Semrush plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Rank Math Pro (from €7.99/mo billed yearly)

  4. Step 4: Analyse keyword performance against Search Console data

    Connect your Search Console data and look for: keywords where you rank positions 4-10 with high impressions (quick win opportunities), pages with high impressions but low CTR (title/meta fixes needed), and keywords where you've lost ground over the past 6 months.

    Tool for this stepSE Ranking

    from £95/mo

    SE Ranking's Search Console integration presents GSC data alongside rank tracking data in the same view — making it easy to find the 'almost ranking' pages that need one focused push.

    SE Ranking plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Semrush (from $139/mo)

  5. Step 5: Compile findings into a prioritised action list

    Organise all audit findings into three buckets: (1) Critical — fix immediately (crawl errors, penalties, indexation issues). (2) High priority — address this month (thin content, missing metadata, toxic backlinks). (3) Long-term — address over the next quarter (content expansion, link building).

    Tool for this stepSemrush

    from $139/mo

    Semrush's consolidated audit dashboard gives you a site health score and a prioritised issue list in one view — making it easy to export a clean action list to share with a client or your team.

    Semrush plans and catches

    Alternative to consider: Seobility (from €59.90/mo)