To do a website audit for SEO, work through seven steps: set a goal and record a baseline, crawl the site, check what Google has indexed, review on-page SEO and content, test performance, audit links and page authority, and check that tracking works. Then rank every finding by impact and effort and turn the top ones into tasks. For a site under a few hundred pages, a focused audit with free tools takes about a day.
This guide is the process: which report to open at each step, what to export, and what counts as a real problem. It also covers two things most audit guides skip: auditing a website you don't own, and diagnosing a sudden traffic drop.
Key takeaways
- A website audit has seven steps: goal and baseline, crawl, indexing, content, performance, links, tracking. Then prioritize.
- You can run a crawl-based site audit on any public website, but Search Console and GA4 data only exist for sites you control.
- Page Authority (Moz) and URL Rating (Ahrefs) are third-party scores from 0 to 100 that estimate a page's link strength. Google does not use either.
- Before calling a traffic drop, rule out reporting changes: when Google dropped &num=100 in September 2025, median impressions fell 33% and average position jumped from 29 to 13 with no ranking change (Outrank, 1,503 sites).
- Google says most sites never need the disavow tool. Use it only for a manual action or links you knowingly bought.
What is a website audit?
A website audit is a structured review of a site to find what stops it from ranking, converting or working properly, followed by a prioritized list of fixes. An SEO website audit focuses on crawling, indexing, content, performance and links.
There are a few related audits, and it helps to know which one you're doing:
- This page: the SEO audit process, start to finish.
- The technical SEO audit checklist: 40 crawl, render, index and speed checks with pass thresholds, for developers.
- The website auditing checklist: the whole-business version, adding tracking, accessibility, conversion, privacy and AI visibility.
Before you start: goal, baseline and tools
Write one sentence that says why you're auditing: "organic sign-ups fell 30% since March", "we're migrating to Webflow in June", "we've never audited and want a fix list". The goal decides which steps get the most time.
Then record a baseline you can compare against later: clicks, impressions and top pages from Search Console → Performance (last 3 months and the same period a year earlier), organic sessions and key events from GA4, and the number of indexed pages from Indexing → Pages. Search Console keeps 16 months of data, so export what you need now.
The tools, and whether they work on a site you don't own:
| Tool | What it does in the audit | Works on any website? | Cost (October 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Indexing, queries, clicks, Core Web Vitals, links | No, only verified sites | Free |
| GA4 | Sessions, conversions, landing pages | No, only sites with your tag | Free |
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Crawls URLs: status codes, titles, canonicals, links | Yes | Free to 500 URLs; $279 per year |
| PageSpeed Insights | Real-user and lab performance for one URL | Yes | Free |
| Ahrefs Free | Site Audit and backlinks for your verified sites | No (paid plans audit any site) | Free |
| Ahrefs or Semrush (paid) | Site audits, backlinks, rankings, competitors | Yes | Paid |
Step 1: Crawl the site
A crawler visits every URL it can reach from your homepage, the way Googlebot does, and records what it finds. In Screaming Frog, paste the domain, press Start, and when it finishes, export these tabs:
- Response Codes: every 3xx, 4xx and 5xx URL, with the pages that link to it (Inlinks).
- Page Titles and Meta Description: missing, duplicate, too long.
- Canonicals and Directives: canonicals pointing elsewhere, pages with noindex.
- Site Structure: crawl depth. Pages more than three or four clicks deep get crawled less.
Connect the Search Console and GA4 APIs in Screaming Frog (Configuration → API Access) and the crawl adds clicks and sessions per URL, which makes prioritizing much easier.
For a single-page or URL audit, crawl just that URL in list mode, run it through PageSpeed Insights, and use Search Console's URL Inspection to see whether it's indexed and which canonical Google picked.
Step 2: Check what Google has indexed
Open Search Console → Indexing → Pages. The two numbers that matter: how many pages are indexed, and how many you want indexed. The reasons listed under "Why pages aren't indexed" tell you what to fix:
- Excluded by 'noindex' tag on pages you want ranked is a bug, usually in a template or plugin setting.
- Duplicate without user-selected canonical means Google sees near-copies; add canonicals or merge pages.
- Crawled - currently not indexed means Google read the page and passed; our guide on fixing crawled but not indexed covers what moves it.
- Not found (404) URLs with internal links or backlinks pointing at them are worth redirecting; see how to fix broken links.
Don't use a site:example.com search to count indexed pages. Google says the operator doesn't return every indexed URL, and the count it shows is a rough estimate.
Step 3: Audit on-page SEO and content
In Search Console → Performance, add the Pages dimension, then click into each important page and switch to Queries. You're looking for three patterns:
- Pages with impressions but almost no clicks. The page ranks, but the title doesn't win the click or the page ranks for the wrong intent. Rewrite the title tag and check that the first paragraph answers the query. Our guide to writing meta titles has the formulas.
- Two pages showing for the same query, swapping positions. That is keyword cannibalization; merge them or make their topics clearly different.
- Pages with no impressions at all after six months. Improve them, merge them into a stronger page with a 301, or remove them.
Then compare formats with what ranks. If the top results for your main query are tools or comparison tables and you have a 600-word article, the format is the problem, not the keywords. In Outrank's study of 6.2 million pages, free tools and calculators earned 2.11× the click-through rate of the same site's articles at positions 4 to 10.
Step 4: Run a website performance audit
Run your five most important templates (home, a category or feature page, a product or pricing page, a blog post, a landing page) through PageSpeed Insights. Read the top section first: it's real-user data from Chrome, and it's what Google uses. The lab score below it is a diagnostic, not a grade.
| Core Web Vital | Good (75th percentile of visits) | What usually breaks it |
|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint | ≤ 2.5 s | Huge or lazy-loaded hero image, slow server response |
| Interaction to Next Paint | ≤ 200 ms | Heavy JavaScript, chat and tag-manager scripts |
| Cumulative Layout Shift | ≤ 0.1 | Images without dimensions, late-loading banners and ads |
For the whole site, Search Console → Experience → Core Web Vitals groups failing URLs by template, so you can fix one template instead of a thousand pages. For a deeper waterfall, WebPageTest shows exactly which file blocks what.
Step 5: Do an SEO link audit (backlinks, internal links and page authority)
A link audit has three parts.
Backlinks. Start with Search Console → Links → Top linked pages (external). It's free and comes from Google. Then use Ahrefs or Semrush to see referring domains over time and spot lost links. The useful findings are rarely "toxic links"; they're valuable links pointing at URLs that now 404 (redirect them) and links you lost when someone edited a page (link reclamation covers both). Google's own guidance is that most sites never need the disavow tool; reserve it for a manual action or links you knowingly bought. To check that specific links you earned or paid for are still live and dofollow, paste the linking pages into Outrank's free backlink monitor.
Internal links. From your crawl, sort pages by inlinks. Your most important pages should have the most internal links pointing at them, with descriptive anchors. Pages with zero inlinks (orphans) need links from related pages. Here's how to find internal links to a page.
Page authority. Page Authority is a Moz score from 1 to 100 that predicts how well a single page can rank, based mostly on the links pointing to it; Ahrefs' equivalent is URL Rating (UR). Neither is a Google metric. In an audit they are useful for one thing: comparing your page's link strength with the pages that outrank it. If every top-five result has three times your referring domains, on-page tweaks won't close the gap; links will. For the domain-level versions, see Domain Rating vs Domain Authority.
Step 6: Audit your tracking
A website tracking audit checks that your numbers are real before you act on them. Complete each conversion yourself (sign up, buy, send the contact form) with GA4's DebugView open and confirm each key event fires once. Check that GA4 data retention is set to 14 months (the default is two), that internal traffic is filtered, and that your consent banner isn't silently blocking tags for everyone.
Then compare GA4 organic sessions with Search Console clicks for the same pages and dates. They never match exactly, but if GA4 dropped while Search Console didn't, the problem is tracking, not SEO.
Step 7: Prioritize and write the fix list
Score every finding on impact (how many important pages and how much traffic it affects) and effort (developer hours), then sort:
| Low effort | High effort | |
|---|---|---|
| High impact | Do this week: noindex on key pages, broken internal links on money pages, titles on high-impression pages | Plan this quarter: template speed fixes, merging cannibalized sections, migration clean-up |
| Low impact | Batch them: alt text, minor redirect chains, meta descriptions on low-traffic pages | Skip or revisit: rebuilds chasing a lab score |
Write each finding as a task with a page, an owner and a date ("Rewrite the title on /pricing to target 'X pricing', Sam, May 30"), not as a category ("improve on-page SEO"). Re-pull your baseline numbers six to eight weeks after the fixes ship. If you'd rather hand the audit off, here is what website SEO audit services typically include.
How to audit a website traffic drop
A traffic-loss audit starts with the shape of the drop, not with a crawl. Answer three questions and the picker below suggests the most likely cause and where to look first.
3-question decision helper
Why did my organic traffic drop?
Question 1 of 3
What dropped?
Two Outrank data points help with the "results page changed" case. Across 415 sites, median CTR fell 40% between October 2025 and August 2026 while median impressions more than doubled, yet 59.5% of the sites still grew clicks (zero-click study). A lower CTR is now the norm; a lower click count is the thing to investigate.
How to audit a website you don't own
You can run a site audit on any public website: a competitor, a prospect or a site you're about to buy. Crawlers like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs (paid) and Semrush (paid) fetch public pages the same way a search engine does, and PageSpeed Insights tests any URL. What you can't see is private data: Search Console indexing reports, real query data and GA4 conversions.
For an outside audit:
- Crawl politely. Lower the crawl speed (Screaming Frog: Configuration → Speed) and respect robots.txt. Some sites block crawlers by user agent or rate.
- Estimate traffic and rankings with Ahrefs or Semrush. Treat their numbers as estimates; they model traffic from rankings and search volume.
- Check the backlink profile and top pages by links in the same tools.
- Test Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights. The field data comes from real Chrome users of that site, so it's as accurate for a competitor as for you.
That outside view is enough to prepare a pitch, size a migration or plan content against a competitor; our SEO competitor analysis guide takes it further.
FAQ
How do I do a website audit?
Set a goal and record baseline numbers, crawl the site with a tool like Screaming Frog, check indexing in Search Console, review titles and content against the queries each page gets, test Core Web Vitals in PageSpeed Insights, audit backlinks and internal links, and confirm tracking works. Then rank the findings by impact and effort and assign each one an owner.
Can I run a site audit on any website?
Yes, for anything public. Crawlers, PageSpeed Insights and SEO suites like Ahrefs and Semrush work on any domain, so you can audit competitors or prospects. Search Console and GA4 data, including exact queries, clicks and indexing reasons, are only available for sites you own or have been given access to.
What is page authority in an SEO audit?
Page Authority is a Moz score from 1 to 100 that estimates how well a specific page can rank, based mainly on its backlinks. Ahrefs' equivalent is URL Rating. Google doesn't use either score, but they are useful for comparing your page's link strength with the pages ranking above it.
How long does a website audit take?
A site with a few hundred pages takes roughly a day with free tools: a couple of hours to crawl and export, a few hours to review Search Console and content, and an hour to prioritize. Large sites with many templates, languages or JavaScript rendering can take one to three weeks.
How often should you audit a website?
Do a full SEO audit once or twice a year, a technical check every quarter, and a targeted audit before and after any migration or redesign. Check the Search Console Pages report weekly so indexing problems surface in days rather than at the next audit.
