What is an SEO Audit?
An SEO audit is a comprehensive review of a website to evaluate how well it is optimised for search engines. It identifies issues that could be preventing a site from ranking well and highlights opportunities for improvement across technical, on-page, and off-page SEO factors.
An SEO audit typically includes:
- Technical SEO checks (site speed, crawlability, mobile-friendliness, indexing)
- On-page SEO analysis (titles, meta descriptions, headings, keyword use)
- Content evaluation (quality, duplication, relevance)
- Link profile analysis (backlinks, internal linking structure)
- User experience and site structure review
Why an SEO Audit Matters
Regular SEO audits help ensure that your site is following best practices and keeping up with algorithm changes, user expectations, and technical performance.
An audit can help you:
- Identify and fix technical errors that affect visibility
- Improve the quality and relevance of your content
- Discover broken links, duplicate pages, or poor metadata
- Monitor the health of your backlink profile
- Benchmark performance and set actionable goals
Audits are especially useful after major updates to your website or following changes in search engine algorithms.
Example in Use
A company notices a sudden drop in organic traffic. They perform an SEO audit and discover several issues: slow-loading pages, missing meta descriptions, and broken internal links. By fixing these problems and improving content structure, they recover their rankings and improve user experience.
SEO audits can be done manually or using tools like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, SEMrush, or Google Search Console.