The Complete SEO Audit Checklist: 30-Point Technical Review

A thorough SEO audit is a diagnostic, not a to-do list — its job is to find every technical and on-page problem standing between your content and the rankings it deserves, then rank those problems by impact so you fix the right things first. A complete audit covers four areas, and they build on each other: crawlability (can Google reach your pages?), indexation (does Google include them in results?), on-page optimization (are those pages optimized for the right keywords?), and performance (do they load fast enough to rank and convert?). Get them out of order and you'll waste effort — there's no point perfecting a page's title if Google can't crawl it in the first place. Here's what we check in each area.

Crawlability: can Google reach your content?

This is the foundation, because a page Google can't crawl can't rank, no matter how good it is:

Robots.txt. Is it accidentally blocking important sections? We've seen entire stores hidden from Google by a single stray Disallow line left over from a staging site — one of the most damaging and most common mistakes there is.
Broken links and redirect chains. 404s waste crawl budget and frustrate users; redirect chains (A → B → C) leak authority and slow crawling. Both should be found and fixed.
XML sitemap. Is it current, accurate, and submitted in Google Search Console? Does it list your real, canonical URLs and exclude junk?
Orphan pages. Pages with no internal links pointing to them are nearly invisible to crawlers. Every important page needs at least a few inbound internal links.
Crawl budget. On large sites, is Google wasting crawls on filtered URLs, parameters, and duplicates instead of your real pages?

Indexation: is Google including the right pages?

Once Google can crawl, the question becomes what it chooses to index:

Accidental noindex. Important pages set to noindex — often a leftover from development — silently vanish from results. We check every key template.
Duplicate content. Multiple URLs serving the same content (http/https, www/non-www, trailing-slash variants, filter URLs) split ranking equity. Consolidate with redirects and canonicals.
Canonical tags. Are they pointing to the correct primary version of each page, or contradicting your sitemap and internal links?
Index bloat. Thin, low-value pages (tag archives, empty categories, search-results pages) being indexed dilute your site's overall quality signal. Prune or noindex them so your ranking power concentrates on the pages that matter.

On-page: is each page optimized for the right term?

Now the page-level work, applied to every important page:

A unique, keyword-led title tag (aim for roughly 50-60 characters so it doesn't truncate).
A compelling meta description (about 150-160 characters) that earns the click.
Exactly one H1 that includes the primary keyword, and a logical heading hierarchy (H1 → H2 → H3) beneath it.
Images with descriptive alt text and sensible filenames.
Internal links from relevant pages, with descriptive anchor text.
Content that genuinely satisfies the search intent behind the target keyword — the single factor that overrides all the mechanical ones.

Missing any of these dilutes a page's ability to rank; missing several usually means it won't rank at all.

Performance: fast enough to rank and to sell

Performance is both a ranking factor and a conversion factor:

Core Web Vitals: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1 — measured on field data from real visitors, not just a lab score.
Mobile usability: responsive layout, tap targets that aren't cramped, readable font sizes. Google evaluates the mobile experience first.
HTTPS: a valid certificate with no mixed-content warnings.
Page speed on both mobile and desktop, since slow pages lose rankings and abandon shoppers at the same time.

The mistake that makes audits useless

A 200-item audit that lists everything and prioritizes nothing is worse than a short one that names the three problems actually holding you back. The value isn't in finding issues — any tool can spit out a list of warnings. It's in judgment: separating the robots.txt line that's hiding your whole store from the cosmetic warning that doesn't affect a single ranking. A good audit is ruthlessly prioritized by impact, so you fix what moves the needle and ignore what doesn't.

Pro tip

Before anything else, open Search Console's Page Indexing report and read the "Not indexed" reasons. It tells you, straight from Google, exactly which of your pages aren't in the index and why — "Excluded by noindex," "Crawled – currently not indexed," "Duplicate without canonical." That single report often surfaces the highest-impact problems in minutes, because it's Google reporting its own decisions about your site rather than a third-party tool guessing. Start your audit there.

Our free audit covers all 30 points. Submit your URL and our team will review it and deliver a detailed report with every issue flagged, ranked by priority, and paired with the exact steps to fix each one.