What is SEO Audit?
A systematic review of a site's SEO health — covering technical issues, on-page optimization, content gaps, backlink profile, and competitor benchmarks.
An SEO audit is a structured assessment of why a site does or doesn't rank, with prioritized recommendations. A standard audit covers: (1) Technical — crawl analysis (using Screaming Frog or Semrush Site Audit), Core Web Vitals, indexability issues, broken links, redirect chains. (2) On-page — title and meta description quality, header structure, internal linking, image alt text, schema markup. (3) Content — gap analysis vs competitors, thin content identification, cannibalization detection (multiple pages targeting the same keyword), content freshness. (4) Off-page — backlink profile health, lost backlinks, toxic links, competitor backlink gaps. (5) Search Console — coverage errors, query performance trends, manual actions. Most audits identify 50-200 issues; prioritization is the actual skill — fixing 10 high-impact issues beats fixing 100 trivial ones. Typical audit deliverable: a spreadsheet of issues with priority, effort, and expected impact.