A useful SEO audit checklist provides a structured list of checks that reviews every factor affecting a website’s search visibility: technical health, indexability, on-page optimization, content quality, local presence, and backlinks.
Working through the audit list in order helps you find and fix the issues holding your rankings back before you invest in new content. This checklist covers 51 points across seven areas.
Key Takeaways
- A complete SEO audit covers seven areas: site setup, technical SEO, keyword research, on-page SEO, local SEO, E-E-A-T, and AI search visibility.
- Run a full audit quarterly. Run the technical SEO checklist monthly on large or frequently updated sites.
- Fix crawlability and indexation issues first. Nothing else in the audit matters if Google can’t reach the page.
- AI Overviews now appear on a large share of Google searches, so an audit that ignores AI search visibility will not help you in 2026.
You need an optimized website to rank on Google.
But more often than not, people who want to optimize their own sites struggle. This checklist will show you what steps you need to follow to create and maintain an optimized site over time.
Following these steps will improve your shot at getting real organic search engine traffic and business through search engines.
This free SEO audit checklist covers 7 core areas of search engine optimization:
- Setting up your site and SEO basics
- Technical SEO
- Keyword research
- On-page SEO and content creation
- Local SEO and E-E-A-T trust signals
- AI search (AEO) visibility
- Link building
Following this guide works whether you’re starting a new site or you want to optimize an existing one.
SEO Audit Checklist at a Glance
| Audit area | Main tools | How often | Checks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site setup & SEO basics | GA4, GSC, Bing WMT, Ahrefs | Once + after migrations | 9 |
| Technical SEO checklist | Ahrefs Site Audit, GSC | Monthly | 10 |
| Keyword research | Ahrefs Keywords Explorer | Quarterly | 5 |
| On-page SEO audit | GSC, Hemingway | Per page / quarterly | 9 |
| Local SEO audit | Google Business Profile | Quarterly | 4 |
| E-E-A-T & trust signals | Manual review | Quarterly | 4 |
| AI search (AEO) audit | GSC, robots.txt, schema | Quarterly | 4 |
| Link building | Ahrefs | Ongoing | 6 |
Site Setup and SEO Basics Checklist
This is where it all begins with SEO. Follow the checklist below to set your site on a firm foundation. Use this section as your pre-audit setup. Every tool here feeds the SEO audit list that follows.
The steps below apply whether you’re building a brand-new site or you’re getting serious about SEO for the first time with an existing website.
1. Plan Your Site Structure
Your website’s architecture has two options: a flat one or one that uses multiple subdirectories to organize your content.
On a flat architecture site, every page branches off the root URL. For example, if your homepage is www.personalinjurylawyer.com, you might have pages like:
- www.personalinjurylawyer.com/car-accident-lawyer/
- www.personalinjurylawyer.com/what-to-do-after-a-car-accident/
It doesn’t matter if one of those pages is a service page and one is a blog post. Both of them live on URLs adjacent to the root domain.
A site with multiple subdirectories organizes pages into folders, like /blog/ and /services/.
Flat sites are easier to create, but it’s harder to keep them organized over time. Sites with multiple subdirectories have better organization by default. But you’ll need to be rigorous with your internal linking to make it easy for search engines to navigate it.
If you have a new site, then you have the advantage here. You get to choose which structure works best for you. People with existing sites may find themselves stuck with one structure or face a hard choice when it comes to redirecting pages on their site.
2. Create a Google Analytics Account
Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that collects data on visitor behavior on your site. By embedding a small piece of code on your site, you can track visitor count, pages visited, and time spent on page.
The most important thing is that you can track conversion events. This will allow you to see which pages convert the most visitors. Understanding these metrics helps identify areas of improvement and assess the effectiveness of your digital marketing tactics.
Go to the Google Analytics homepage to start your setup. All you need to do is sign in with your Google Account.
3. Set Up Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) offers insights into how Google views your site. While it won’t give you a resolute "SEO score" per se, it does give you access to key data, such as search queries that lead users to your site and which pages get the most clicks. It can also inform you of your site’s organic traffic and organic search performance, as well as any site errors, issues, or penalties that could affect your search ranking.
Use GSC to submit your sitemap so that Google will crawl and index your site. It’s also where you can submit pages for indexing each time you publish a new one.
Go to the Google Search Console homepage and sign in with the Google account associated with your site’s Analytics instance.
4. Set Up Bing Webmaster Tools
Google is the most popular search engine, but you’ll want to make sure that people can find your site on Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools fills the same role as Google Search Console. Because ChatGPT uses Bing, you will want to optimize your site for Bing to improve your chances of earning a citation or recommendation in Chat.
Go to the Bing Webmaster Tools homepage to get started.
5. Install an SEO Plugin
Websites built with WordPress need an SEO plugin. These tools simplify website optimization. With an SEO plugin, you can manage things like title tags and meta descriptions. You can set up page redirects. Some tools will even help you generate a sitemap and a robots.txt file, which you need for the next steps.
We recommend that you use one of the following plugins: Yoast or Rank Math.
6. Create Your Sitemap
Your website will not magically appear on Google and Bing. You have to point the search engine to your site. Creating a sitemap is the first step to doing that.
Your sitemap is a file on your website that lists all of your live pages. Google uses your sitemap as instructions for crawling and indexing your site. An SEO plugin makes creating a sitemap easier.
If you don’t know if your site already has a sitemap, check out our guide to indexing with Google.
7. Create Your Robots.txt File
Your robots.txt file is another special file on your site with instructions for search engines. This file tells search engines and other bots which areas of your site they are and are not allowed to crawl. Setting up a robots.txt file allows you to keep private pages out of Google’s index. That means those pages should never show up in the search results.
WordPress will generate a default robots file for you, but you can modify it with your SEO plugin.
8. Submit Your Sitemap to Search Engines
Now that you have a sitemap, you’re ready to submit it to search engines so that they can index it. The first place to start is with Google Search Console. Log into your Google Search Console account for your site, then follow along with this guide to submit your first sitemap.
You can repeat this process for any additional sitemaps.
Follow these steps to submit your site to Bing:
1. Log into Bing Webmaster Tools
2. Select the Sitemaps option from the left-hand sidebar
3. Click on the Submit Sitemap button
4. Enter your sitemap URL into the popup dialog box that appears on your screen
5. Click Submit
Google and Bing will both begin to crawl and index your site as soon as you submit your sitemap to them.
9. Set Up A Site Audit Tool
The final tool that you need to complete your basic setup is an SEO-oriented site audit tool. These tools will give you more granular monitoring options to keep track of your site’s search performance. You can track keyword rankings, technical issues, site speed, and more with one of these tools. You can also perform site audits on an automated schedule.
We recommend Ahrefs as your site audit tool. Ahrefs is an industry-standard SEO tool. Its Site Audit application will give you a ton of SEO insights and action items. The Ahrefs suite also includes keyword research and rank-tracking tools that will help you in steps that come later in this checklist.
First, you will need to create an account with Ahrefs. Then, you can set up their Site Audit tool to run regular performance checks on your website.
That’s all you need to set your SEO foundation. Once you complete your Ahrefs Site Audit, you can check technical SEO performance.
Next, you will need to configure the settings for your site crawl using the guide below.
All that remains is to finalize your crawl settings, and Ahrefs will take it from there.
That's all you need to set your SEO foundation. Once your Ahrefs Site Audit is complete, you're ready to check technical SEO performance.
Technical SEO Checklist
Technical SEO ensures that you configure everything on your site so that search engines can find and understand your content.
The following SEO audit will walk you through technical SEO necessities like making your site indexable and secure, finding and fixing broken elements, and making improvements so that your site is the best it can be.
1. Run a Technical SEO Audit
You need a technical SEO audit to optimize an existing website. You can follow the same steps for running your technical audit as you did for setting up your first site audit in Ahrefs.
For a deep dive into the world of technical audits, check out our guide here. Otherwise, the checklist items below will walk you through the core elements to look for.
Note: You may find many issues while you work your way through the technical checklist. We recommend exporting all of your issues from Ahrefs into a spreadsheet until you can act on them. This will prevent you from playing whack-a-mole with little issues and help you stay focused on the big problems.
2. Check Your Site's Crawlability and Indexability
People will not find your site if Google cannot crawl or index its pages. The first way to check for indexability issues is to check the page indexing report in Google Search Console.
SEO audit tools like GSC provide some insights. For a more comprehensive view, refer to your Ahrefs site audit. Your robots.txt file may block Google from viewing important pages. Any site crawler will have issues finding pages blocked by robots.txt, and Ahrefs can help you find them.
Export your indexing issues to act on them in the future. Check out our guide to getting Google to index your site if you still see indexing issues.
SEO audit tools like GSC provide some insights. For a more comprehensive view, refer to your Ahrefs site audit, as shown in the guide below.
Your robots.txt file may be blocking Google from viewing important pages. Any site crawler will have issues finding pages blocked by robots.txt, but Ahrefs can help you find them. Here’s how:
Export your indexing issues to act on them in the future.
Check out our guide to getting Google to index your site if you’re still seeing indexing issues.
3. Make Sure Your Site Uses HTTPS
HTTPS is an internet communication protocol that protects the confidentiality of data between your visitor’s computer and your site. Sites that use the HTTPS protocol have an SSL certificate. This digital certificate indicates to users and search engines that your site is secure. Potential eavesdroppers will have a harder time getting a hold of visitors’ data on a secure site than on sites using HTTP.
You can get a free SSL certificate from sites like Let’s Encrypt. Installing an SSL depends on your site’s hosting provider. They should have documentation available to walk you through adding the certificate.
4. Look Out for Duplicate Versions of Your Domain
People can access your website at 1 of 4 different domain variations: http://www, https://www, http://, and https://. Search engines will have a hard time crawling and indexing your site if more than one version of the URL is accessible. If the HTTP version is accessible, then you also have a potential security issue on your hands.
You can check for multiple accessible versions of your domain by using a free tool from httpstatus.io.
The same problem happens at the page level with trailing slashes: example.com/page and example.com/page/ are two different URLs to Google. If both return a 200 status code, Google can index them separately and split your clicks, impressions, and link equity between them. Pick one format, ideally the one your canonical tags already point to, and 301-redirect the other version site-wide.
To fix this issue, just take the URLs that you don’t want people to access and redirect them to the version that you do.
5. Check Page Speed & Core Web Vitals
Slow pages and pages with large files frustrate visitors. Fixing slow pages will improve the experience on your site, making people more likely to stick around and consume your content. Google interprets people staying on your site as a sign of your page quality.
Check three Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024. Google’s Core Web Vitals documentation lists the current thresholds for each metric: LCP under 2.5 seconds, CLS under 0.1, and INP under 200 milliseconds.
You can check your core web vitals on GSC. Finding page speed issues is easy when you use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool. Export these issues from your site audit so you can act on them later.
Export these issues from your site audit so you can act on them later.
6. Use Image Compression Tools
Compressing your images can greatly improve your site speed. The huge file sizes of uncompressed images can make it harder for a browser to load your page. Your audit will also show you other image issues, like missing alt text and images on an insecure HTTP URL.
Compressing large images is easy on a WordPress website. We recommend installing the Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin. This tool will handle image file sizes and strip unnecessary data for you. If your site is not on WordPress, you can use tools like ShortPixel and TinyPNG to reduce your image file sizes.
7. Find and Fix Broken Pages
Few things are more aggravating than clicking on a link only to land on a broken page.
You end up with a broken page when you delete a page but forget to set up a redirect to another one. The end result is a page with a 404 status code.
The good news is that finding broken pages is one of the simplest parts of a technical audit. Follow the guide below to see how.
If you deleted the page by accident, all you need to do is reset the status code using your SEO plugin.
There are 2 options for fixing broken pages that you meant to delete:
- Redirect the page to a relevant alternative using your SEO plugin
- Find all internal links pointing to that page and update them to a relevant alternative
The first option is always the easiest one. And it ensures that any backlinks pointing to the broken page redirect to a live page.
8. Find and Fix Broken Links
Broken links evoke the same frustration as broken pages, but they also make your site harder for Google to crawl.
Here's how you can find broken links using Ahrefs:
There are plenty of errors that can cause broken links.
You might find that you've misspelled some URLs, that some pages don't have links at all, or that you have live links to a page you meant to redirect.
Ahrefs can help you spot the most common culprits, but there are a few rarer issues that you can check for from time to time. Check out our guide to finding broken links if you think there are deeper linking issues on your site.
9. Resolve Duplicate Content Issues
Having two pages on your site that are the same or almost indistinguishable can cause confusion for Google.
One way to look for duplicate content is to find pages that use incorrect canonical tags.
After you've identified and exported all of these issues from Ahrefs, you're ready to get started on fixing them.
You may find some critical issues that you'll need to deal with right away. But you can place others on a list of action items to resolve in tandem with the other SEO activities on this checklist.
10. Examine Schema Markup & Robots Meta Tag
Schema markup is a code that you add to your website that provides what's called structured data. Structured data helps search engines better understand the content on your pages. By using schema, you can enhance the way your website appears in search results, which can lead to improved click-through rates and greater visibility in Google search results. This includes information like reviews, ratings, events, and other relevant data that can generate rich snippets.
On the other hand, the robots meta tag is crucial for controlling how search engines interact with your site. This tag tells search engines whether to index a page or follow the links on it. For example, using “noindex” can prevent certain pages from being displayed in search results, which is useful for duplicate content or private sections of your site that you don’t want indexed.
Keyword Research Checklist
The technical steps above ensure that your site runs well and that people can find it on Google. But keyword research gives you the fuel to create content worth finding.
The checklist below will walk you through the basics you need to know about this process. If you want a deep dive, check out our end-to-end guide to keyword research. It’s full of extra details and background information on how it works.
1. Create a List of Seed Keywords and Keyword Modifiers
Keyword research begins with brainstorming a list of seed keywords.
These are the most basic terms related to the service, niche, or product that you want to rank for on search engines. The seeds you select will form the foundation for all the keyword research steps that follow.
An attorney who wants to get more car accident cases might think of seed keywords like:
- accident
- accidents
- crash
- crashes
- wreck
- wrecks
That shortlist will generate thousands of more complex keywords when you enter them into a keyword research tool.
But not all of them will be related to a law firm.
You'll find relevant terms like car wreck and semi truck accident. You'll also get keywords that aren't useful, like is the housing market going to crash or airplane crash news.
That's where keyword modifiers come into play.
Thinking of some modifiers that filter out irrelevant terms will save you time throughout the keyword research process.
A personal injury lawyer may come up with modifiers like:
- settle
- sue
- lawyer
- law
- attorney
You only need a few seeds to generate millions of matching keywords.
It's best to keep the list short and related to the same core topic or primary keyword. Trying to do keyword research with seeds for two different topics at once makes the process of filtering for relevance harder. For example, you would want to do research on car accidents and divorce law in separate batches.
2. Generate Keyword Ideas From the Seeds
Now that you have your seed keywords, you're ready to add them to a keyword research tool to generate new ideas.
Go to Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and enter your seed keywords into the tool. Follow the guide below for a step-by-step walkthrough.
Entering your seed keywords will only show you the metrics for those specific terms. You will need to use the Matching Terms report to see all the related keyword ideas. Use the interactive guide below to see this report in action.
The Matching Terms report can return millions of related keywords, depending on the popularity of your seeds.
Some of them will be relevant to you, but many others will not.
You’ll need to filter down the list using a combination of the modifiers you came up with in the last step and Ahrefs’ built-in filters.
Using the include and exclude filters will help you slim down the list to one that is more manageable and relevant.
We recommend always setting a filter to eliminate keywords that contain certain symbols and junk characters. These keywords have low (or no) search volume and don’t have any value.
You can copy and paste the following snippet into the exclude filter to get rid of these junk terms:
_,",?,$,.,/,',:,;,www,-,+,\,|,(,),&,#,@,!,^,},{,],[,<,>,`~, site: You will have a much more focused list after setting all your filters. Now you’re ready to start adding relevant keywords to a shortlist so that you can plan future content around them.
Here’s how to add terms to a list in Ahrefs:
Building a solid keyword list will help you create a more focused content plan than just exporting every potential idea.
3. Assess Your Keyword Ideas
Adding keywords to your list isn't as simple as just picking what looks good. There are a few things you should assess each keyword for before shortlisting them.
The first thing to check a keyword for is its search intent. Every time someone uses Google to search for something, they have an underlying intention. They may be looking for a product to buy, to find a specific website, or just looking for information on a given topic.
When you're doing keyword research, you can disqualify some of the ones where you will not be able to meet the intent. Here's how you can check intent in Ahrefs:
The next thing to assess is business value and topical relevance. The only way you can tell if a keyword has business value is by checking if businesses like your own rank for that term. Here's how you can assess relevance in Ahrefs:
The final assessment before shortlisting is checking how hard it could be to rank for the keyword.
Ahrefs' Keyword Difficulty (KD) score measures how hard it is to rank for a term based on the number of backlinks held by the top-ranking page. You can use it as a rough measurement when assessing keywords for your list by following the guide below.
KD shouldn't be the deciding factor in whether or not you should disqualify a keyword. There are plenty of instances where a new website ranks for a “hard” keyword.
And there are situations where you should target a high KD term because of its relevance to your business.
For example, a divorce lawyer should target the term divorce lawyer no matter what the KD of that term may be. If it's relevant to your business, and you can meet the intent, you can overlook the difficulty score.
4. Perform Competitor Keyword Research
One other place to find new keyword ideas is by looking at what your closest competitors rank for.
Use the guide below to see how you can use Ahrefs to find your competitors' best keywords.
You can add your competitor's keywords to the same shortlist in the previous steps. You'll also want to assess each term for relevance, business value, intent, and difficulty.
Identifying your online competitors can be trickier than you might think.
The businesses you compete with on Google are almost never the competitors across town. If you don't already know who your online competitors are, check out our guide to competitor keyword research to learn how to spot them.
5. Plan Your Content
You're ready to start planning your content as soon as you feel satisfied with your keyword shortlist.
You can export that list from Ahrefs and place it in a Google Sheet or Excel. This will allow you to make changes to the list. For example, you can add a column for planning draft dates or create a column for notes on each keyword.
Follow this guide to export your list:
Once you have the keywords in a spreadsheet, you can organize them in the order that makes the most sense to you. You might decide to create new content based on the search volume, the difficulty, or by grouping the terms into related themes.
One thing you should check when you plan content is whether two similar keywords should be the target of one new page or two.
For example, slip and fall lawyer and slip and fall attorney are the same keywords for all intents and purposes. Creating two different pages would be a waste of your SEO efforts.
It could also cause Google to have trouble deciding which one to rank when a potential client searches for a premises liability lawyer.
You can prevent these issues by using Ahrefs' SERP Similarity tool to compare any two keywords.
Organizing your content plan and comparing related keywords takes time, but it will give you a clear picture of what content you need to create for your site. Having that plan makes the content creation process much easier than selecting topics at random.
On-Page SEO and Content Creation Checklist
You completed keyword research and put together a solid list of topics to cover. Now, it’s time to create new content. The checklist below will walk you through key considerations for each piece you put into your content pipeline — and it doubles as an on-page audit checklist you can run against pages you already published.
1. Find and Satisfy Search Intent
You should create each piece of content that you want to rank on Google with a person in mind.
Every time someone searches for something on Google, they have a goal in mind. They might want to learn something new, hire an attorney, or compare two similar products.
They could want the content they find in a specific format. They could want a guide, a sales page, a listicle, or something else entirely.
Google's goal is to satisfy the user's search intent. Google's algorithm tries to find the content that best matches the intent and serve that to the searcher.
You need to identify the search intent for each keyword you want to target and match your content to it. That's what gives your page the best shot at being the one Google serves up to the searcher.
There are 3 components to consider when you assess search intent:
- Content type
- Content format
- Content angle
Content type is the broadest level. What you're looking for here is whether your content needs to be a blog post, a service or product page, a category page, or something else. Use the following guide to see how to use Google to check this level of intent.
Content format is the next level down. You can think of this as being a page's subtype. For example, a page might need to be a blog post, but its content format could be a guide, a list, an opinion piece, or even a tool.
Here's how you can check for content format:
The last layer is the content angle. Content angles for blog posts include things like:
- Versus
- Benefits
- Pros and Cons
- Top X/Best X
- Year/Freshness
- How to
- Definitions
Here’s how you can spot the angle by looking at a keyword’s search results:
The content angle is more flexible than the type or format. Sometimes, there isn’t a clear angle to take. But if you see that every page ranking in the search results is a “top X” list, it’s pretty clear what your page should be.
2. Write for Your Reader
Satisfying someone's intent is only part of getting someone to read your content. It has to be enjoyable to read, too. There are too many options on the web for someone to sift through a piece of content that isn't worth the effort.
Write at your reader's level.
It doesn't matter if you work in the most complex legal area or sell the simplest product. Writing over the reader's head will not impress them; it will just frustrate them.
Use a tool like the Hemingway App to simplify your prose before you publish it.
Here are a few other tips for readability:
- Avoid jargon and explain it if you must use it
- Write in the active voice
- Use simple words and phrases
People don't read content online. They skim it to find the parts that they think are relevant. Your content should take these skimmers into account.
The easiest way to do that is by breaking up your content into scannable sections of text.
Here's an example from two different blog posts on the same topic:
The blog post snippet on the left has more details, but it's also a pain to read. The snippet on the right is much less daunting.
Use images that illustrate key points to catch people's attention. Break up your text with things like callout boxes, numbered lists, bold text, and other stylistic choices. These seem like small things, but they can make reading more enjoyable.
3. Organize Your Content with Headings
Structuring your content with headings is important for two reasons:
- It improves the readability and scannability of your content
- It helps search engines understand the structure of your page
Breaking your content up into a logical hierarchy makes your piece easier for everyone to understand. Not to mention that search engines love content that follows HTML best practices.
Each piece of content you produce should have one h1 tag. You can think of this as your page's title or primary point.
Your supporting points should nest under the h1 as h2 tags. Subsections that support h2 tags should be set to an h3.
Here's a real-world example using the structure of this article:
- H1: Comprehensive SEO Checklist: 38 Points to Check (Plus Interactive Guides + Template)
- H2: On-page SEO and Content Creation Checklist
- H3: 1. Find and Satisfy Search Intent
- H3: 2. Write for Your Reader
- H3: 3. Organize Your Content with Headings
4. Use Your Keyword in the URL
Using your keyword in your URL is another practice that is helpful for both people and search engines.
For example, the following URLs could have the same content, but one will clue you in on the contents without looking at the page:
- https://www.example.com/articles/19918231/
- https://www.example.com/seo-checklist/
Using your target keyword as the slug is another signal showing Google what your page is about. Seeing a relevant URL on the search engine results page reassures people that the page covers what they're looking for.
Some sources will tell you that you should aim to keep your URLs short.
We recommend using your primary keyword. Most main keywords are short. And the boost from people knowing what they're getting into by looking at the URL alone is valuable.
5. Set an Engaging Title Tag
Your page's title tag is the blue link that shows up in Google's search results. It's distinct from the page's h1 tag, which most people think of as the title.
Your title tag should contain your target keyword. It should also match the search intent for that term.
Setting your title tag is a crucial way to entice people to click on your page from their search results. People are more likely to click on your page when it stands out from the competition while still matching the search intent.
Take these two title tags in the search results for the keyword car accident settlement calculator:
The first result from AllLaw has a far more interesting title tag than the second one.
Studies have shown that Google rewrites title tags more than 60% of the time. Google's algorithm will adjust titles in cases where it thinks it'll improve the click-through rate. But when Google doesn't change it, it's in your best interest to have something that elicits a click.
6. Write Enticing Meta Descriptions
Google rewrites meta descriptions about as often as it does title tags.
But youl'll want to have a meta description that compels a click in cases where Google doesn't rewrite it.
The meta description in the example above lays out who this page is for and how it will help the reader.
The meta description for each page is your chance to expand on the title. You can show the searcher what they will get by clicking on your page. The entire goal is to give them a reason to visit your site over the others.
7. Link to Useful Resources and Cite Your Sources
Finding ways to provide value to your site's visitors is a great way to earn their trust. It also helps your page satisfy their search intent, which directly influences search engine rankings.
Be on the lookout for useful resources that you can link to that will help your readers.
You may find a YouTube video, tool, or study that adds value to the topic you're writing about. Don't be afraid to add a link if you think it will help someone who lands on your site.
The same goes for backing up your claims. Citing your sources lets people know they can trust you.
Here's what John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, had to say about the value of linking to resources:
8. Look for Internal Link Opportunities
External links to useful pages across the web are great for your visitors. However, sending them to another helpful page on your site is great for them and for you.
Internal links between different pieces on your website are a Google ranking factor. Link from an existing page on your website to a new page does a few important things:
- It helps visitors navigate through your site and can push them through your marketing funnel
- It helps Google find and index the pages on your site
- It helps build a web of topical authority through related and interlinked pages
Here's a quick interactive guide to finding internal link opportunities on your site:
Any time you publish a new page, look for opportunities to link to it from your older content. Older content that ranks can even pass on some authority to the new page, increasing the chances that your new page will rank, too.
9. Name Your Image Files and Set Their Alt Text
Setting a descriptive name for each image file is a simple thing to do that gives Google a little bit more context into the contents of each page.
For example, an image with the name car-accident-settlements-chart is far more descriptive than a string of numbers and letters.
Setting the alt text for your images is critical for people who rely on screen readers to navigate the web. People with visual impairments rely on these devices to describe the images on each page. The screen readers cannot describe an image if you haven't set the alt text.
P.S. In case you missed it in the technical checklist, you'll want to make sure that you compress your images to boost your page speed.
Local SEO Audit Checklist
Local visibility is a ranking system of its own. If your business serves a geographic area — like a law firm, medical practice, or home services company — your audit isn’t complete without these checks. Relevance, distance, and prominence drive local results, and each of the items below feeds at least one of those signals.
This is a core part of how we approach SEO for lawyers, where the map pack often matters more than the classic organic results.
1. Audit Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is your most valuable local SEO asset. Verify your profile, make your primary category specific ("Personal Injury Attorney," not just "Lawyer"), and list current and complete services, hours, photos, and posts. An incomplete profile loses map pack positions to competitors with weaker websites but stronger profiles.
2. Check NAP Consistency
Make your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) identical everywhere they appear: your website, your GBP, and major directories. If you’re listed as "Smith & Jones, LLC" on your site but "Smith and Jones" on a directory, those discrepancies weaken Google’s confidence in your business entity and LLMs’ as well. Audit your top citations and fix mismatches at the source.
3. Review Your Review Profile
Reviews influence both rankings and conversions, so audit four things: total volume compared to the competitors ranking above you, recency (a steady stream beats an old batch), average rating, and whether you respond to reviews. If you lack a systematic process for requesting reviews from happy clients, that’s the single highest-impact fix in this section.
4. Audit Your Local Landing Pages
Every location or service area you want to rank in needs one indexable, genuinely unique page with local proof like staff, directions, testimonials, and area-specific content. A batch of near-identical pages with only the city name swapped is a doorway-page pattern that Google’s spam policies target. Quality over quantity wins here.
Service businesses win cases and clients in competitive verticals through local SEO. It’s a pillar of our law firm SEO service for exactly that reason.
E-E-A-T & Trust Signals Audit
Google’s quality rater guidelines evaluate content for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). These aren’t direct ranking factors you can toggle, but they describe the signals Google’s systems reward — especially on Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics. Audit your site for the four items below.
1. Named Authors on Every Post
Every article should have a real, credentialed author with a byline that links to a bio page. Anonymous content creates a trust gap for readers and for the systems evaluating your site. If your blog publishes under a generic "Admin" or company name, fixing bylines is a fast, high-leverage win.
2. Author Bio Depth
A name alone isn’t enough. Bio pages should show what makes the author qualified: credentials, years of experience, education, and links to professional profiles. For lawyers, that means bar admissions, practice focus, and notable results. Flag thin, one-line bios in your audit and expand them.
3. First-Hand Experience Signals
The first E stands for Experience. Audit whether your content demonstrates it: original data, screenshots of real processes, case results, and firsthand observations beat rewritten generic advice. Ask of every important page: Does this offer information a competitor couldn’t produce without doing the work?
4. About, Contact & Editorial Pages
Make it easy to verify who is behind the site. Check that you have a substantive About page, a Contact page with a real address and phone number, and — for publishers — an editorial policy explaining how you produce and review content. These pages rarely rank, but they support the trust evaluation of everything that does.
AI Search (AEO) Audit Checklist
AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity now answer a meaningful share of queries before searchers ever reach the classic blue links. Semrush’s 2025 study of more than 10 million keywords tracked AI Overviews growing from about 6.5% of queries in January 2025 to a peak near 25% by mid-year, and BrightEdge found search impressions up roughly 49% since launch while click-throughs fell about 30%. Auditing your AI search visibility is no longer optional — here’s what to check.
1. Check AI Overview Presence for Your Money Keywords
Search your most valuable keywords, then note whether an AI Overview appears and whether it cites you. In Google Search Console, watch for patterns where impressions climb but clicks fall on specific queries. That’s often the AI Overview effect.
2. Audit Answer-Ready Formatting
AI systems extract content structured for extraction. Audit your key pages for a direct answer in the first paragraph under the heading, question-form H2s and H3s, tables for comparisons, and lists for processes. Google consistently skips pages that bury the answer under long intros in favor of pages that lead with it — exactly the structure this checklist now uses.
3. Verify Crawler Access for AI Bots
Check your robots.txt for rules affecting GPTBot (ChatGPT), Google-Extended (Google’s AI training control), and PerplexityBot. Some sites blocked these bots by default via a plugin or CDN setting without ever deciding to. Whatever your policy, make it a deliberate choice — blocking AI crawlers means they cannot cite your content.
4. Audit Structured Data Coverage
Confirm your key templates output valid Article, FAQPage, Organization, and Person schema. Structured data helps machines understand what your content is, who wrote it, and which entity stands behind it — all of which supports attribution in AI-generated answers. Validate with Google’s Rich Results Test as part of every audit.
If you want AI engines to cite your content, see our guide on how to rank in ChatGPT search. If you’d rather have specialists handle the whole discipline, that’s exactly what our AI SEO service does.
SEO Audit Example: A 30-Minute Mini Audit
Here’s a quick SEO audit example showing how the checklist works in practice.
Suppose you’re auditing a mid-sized services site. You start at the top of the list — crawlability — and work down. After 30 minutes, your audit list might look like this:
| Check | Example finding | Fix & priority |
|---|---|---|
| Indexability (GSC) | 34 blog pages stuck in "Crawled – currently not indexed" | Improve or prune thin posts; consolidate overlapping topics — High |
| Duplicate URLs | /page and /page/ both return 200 and appear separately in GSC | Site-wide 301 to the canonical format; update internal links — High |
| Core Web Vitals | INP fails on mobile (380 ms) | Defer third-party scripts; audit tag manager — Medium |
| On-page | Money page title tag is missing the primary keyword | Rewrite the title and front-load the keyword — High |
| E-E-A-T | Blog posts have no author bylines | Add named authors and credentialed bio pages — Medium |
| AI search | No direct-answer blocks or FAQ schema on top pages | Add answer-first intros and FAQPage markup — Medium |
Notice the pattern: The highest priorities are the ones closest to the top of the checklist. A perfect title tag can’t save a page Google can’t index, which is why the audit order matters as much as the checks themselves.
Link Building Checklist
Link building sits at the end of the line of SEO activities, but it's no less important.
Links from authoritative and relevant websites pass on some of their authority to you. Building links is an important way to get Google to recognize your site as an authority in its own right.
Follow the checklist items below to build new links to your site.
1. Run a Competitor Backlink Analysis
The best place to start any link-building campaign is to see where you stand against your competitors. And the simplest way to do that is by running a competitor backlink analysis.
Competitor backlink analyses come in two different flavors:
- Taking a targeted, keyword-based approach to determine how many links you need to rank for a given term
- Taking a broad, domain-based approach to discover what kinds of content on your competitors' sites generate the most organic links
The approach that you take determines the exact steps to follow. We recommend checking out our complete guide to both processes here to decide which one you need.
2. Broken Link Building
Broken link building is a type of link-building campaign where you look for instances where one site used to link to a resource, but that resource is no longer available. For example, the site owner may have deleted the linked page and never redirected the link.
When you come across one of these broken links, you may be able to contact the referring website and ask them to link to you.
Check if a resource on your site could fill the gap. Or you could decide that it's worth it to make a new page that's link-worthy. Then reach out to the referring domain, tell them that they have a broken link, and offer yours as a replacement.
Here's the best part: your competitor backlinks analysis can show you instances of broken links on your competitors' sites.
3. Run a Guest Posting Campaign
Guest posting is a classic link building tactic. You write a post for another website—ideally one with authority in your space—and they allow you to link back to your own website.
For example, a lawyer may want to write a post on sites like Attorney at Work or Above the Law.
We recommend checking out our guide to guest posting to get started on this type of campaign. It's full of tips for both finding and pitching your blog ideas to other websites.
4. Resource Page Link Building
Resource pages are all across the web once you know where to find them.
These pages are long collections of useful links on a given topic. For example, a site that lists and links out to a variety of pages on what to do after a car accident is a resource page.
Finding these types of pages is easy if you use the following Google advanced search operators:
- [topic] intitle:resources inurl:resources.html
- [topic] intitle:links inurl: resources.html
- [topic] inurl:.com/resources
- [topic] inurl:resources intitle:resources
Replace “[topic]” with your site's main topic when you search, and you'll find resource pages in your zone of expertise.
Check the pages that you have on your site against the links on the resource page. You can reach out to the site owner if you feel you have a resource that fills a gap.
This type of link building can be hit-or-miss, depending on your business. Law firm owners may find that most resource pages are owned by other law firms. These competitors may not be willing to link to you.
5. Content Upgrade Link Building
Links that point to pages that are out of date, shallow, or just plain bad are frustrating for people exploring the Internet, but they're also a golden opportunity for you.
Content upgrade link building, or skyscraper link building, is a process of replacing a bad link to your site with a better one.
The competitor backlink analysis you did earlier will help with this.
Look through the data and find pages that link to your competitors. Look for any competitor pages that are out of date or where the content is unsatisfying. Create a better version of that competitor page. Then, reach out to the referring domain and offer your page as an upgraded link.
Final Thoughts
You can follow along with this checklist to get real DIY results. However, crafting an SEO strategy and seeing long-term payoff takes time. Completing all of these activities doesn’t mean you’ll see results right away. Keep an eye on your site’s performance in Google Analytics, Search Console, and with your Ahrefs Site Audit to see how your changes affect your site.
And if you’d rather see exactly where your site stands without running the audit yourself, that’s what we do every day.
Request a complimentary growth audit and our team will show you where your biggest ranking opportunities are — and the path to capture them.
Frequently Asked Questions About SEO Audit Checklist
What is an SEO audit checklist?
An SEO audit checklist is a step-by-step list used to review every factor that affects a site’s search performance — technical health, indexation, on-page optimization, content quality, local signals, backlinks, and AI search visibility. It turns an audit from guesswork into a repeatable process you can run on any site.
How often should you run an SEO audit?
Run a full SEO audit quarterly and a technical SEO checklist monthly. Also run one after any site migration, redesign, CMS change, or major Google algorithm update, since new issues usually appear then.
What should an SEO audit include?
A complete audit includes crawlability and indexability checks, HTTPS and duplicate-URL checks, Core Web Vitals, on-page elements (titles, headings, internal links), content quality and E-E-A-T signals, local SEO if you serve a geographic area, your backlink profile, and AI search visibility.
What is the difference between a technical SEO audit and an on-page SEO audit?
A technical SEO audit checks whether search engines can crawl, render, and index your site — speed, status codes, sitemaps, and canonicals. An on-page SEO audit checks whether you optimized each page to rank: titles, headings, keyword usage, internal links, and content quality.
How long does an SEO audit take?
A mini audit of the highest-impact items takes about 30 minutes with the right tools. A full audit of a mid-sized site typically takes 4–8 hours, plus ongoing time to implement the fixes in priority order.