How to Audit Your Website for SEO (Step-by-Step)

You can't fix what you can't see

Most SEO issues are invisible. Your site looks perfect in the browser, but Google sees something different: a missing canonical tag splitting your rankings, a noindex tag hiding your best page, a broken sitemap pointing to URLs that don't exist.

An SEO audit finds these invisible problems before they cost you traffic. Here's how to do one systematically, from the checks that matter most to the ones that give you an edge. Every step below links to a free tool that runs that check for you if you'd rather not do it by hand.

Step 1: Check indexability

Nothing else matters if Google can't index your pages. Start here.

robots.txt

Visit https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check for overly broad Disallow rules. The most common mistake is a staging-environment Disallow: / that ships to production:

# Fetch your robots.txt and check for broad blocks
curl -s https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt

Look for rules that block important directories like /blog/, /products/, or static asset paths like /_next/. A robots.txt validator parses the file the way Googlebot does and flags conflicting or overly broad rules; the robots.txt testing guide explains the syntax and how to catch a bad file before it ships.

noindex tags

Check every important page for <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tags. These tell Google to drop the page from search results entirely. Also check for the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, which does the same thing but is harder to spot:

curl -s https://yourdomain.com | grep -i "noindex"
curl -sI https://yourdomain.com | grep -i "x-robots-tag"

XML sitemap

Your sitemap at /sitemap.xml should exist, return a 200 status, contain valid XML, and list only URLs that actually resolve. A sitemap full of 404s wastes your crawl budget and signals poor site maintenance to Google.

A sitemap validator will check that:

• Every URL in the sitemap returns 200
• No staging or development URLs are included
• The sitemap is referenced in your robots.txt
• lastmod dates are accurate (don't set them all to today)

Step 2: Audit meta tags

Meta tags control how your pages appear in search results. Missing or broken meta tags mean Google has to guess - and it usually guesses wrong.

Title tags

Every page needs a unique title between 50-60 characters. Check for:

• Missing titles (Google generates a bad one for you)
• Duplicate titles across pages (signals redundant content)
• Titles over 60 characters (get truncated in search results)
• Generic titles like "Home" or "Untitled"

Meta descriptions

Write a unique description of 150-160 characters for each page. Descriptions aren't a ranking factor, but they control your search snippet and directly affect click-through rates.

<!-- Bad: missing or generic -->
<meta name="description" content="Welcome to our website" />

<!-- Good: specific and action-oriented -->
<meta name="description"
  content="Run 60 SEO checks in 30 seconds. Catch noindex tags,
  broken robots.txt, and missing meta tags before launch." />

Canonical URLs

Every page should declare its canonical URL to prevent duplicate content issues. Without canonicals, Google might index your page at /pricing, /pricing/, and /pricing?ref=nav as three separate pages - splitting your ranking signals. Run a meta tag checker for titles, descriptions, and robots directives, and a canonical tag checker for the resolved canonical on each URL.

Step 3: Check heading structure

Your heading hierarchy tells Google (and screen readers) how your content is organized. Common problems:

• Multiple <h1> tags on a single page
• Skipped heading levels (jumping from <h2> to <h4>)
• Empty heading tags
• Headings used for styling instead of structure

Every page should have exactly one <h1>, and headings should follow a logical order without gaps. An h1 checker renders the full outline of any page so you can see the gaps at a glance - heading structure mistakes covers why each one matters.

Step 4: Review Core Web Vitals

Google uses three performance metrics as ranking signals:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): How fast the main content loads. Target: under 2.5 seconds.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): How fast the page responds to user input. Target: under 200ms.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): How much the layout moves during loading. Target: under 0.1.

Run Google Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools (F12 > Lighthouse tab) on your key pages. Focus on the pages that drive the most traffic first.

The most common fixes:

• Add width and height to images (fixes CLS)
• Lazy-load below-the-fold images (fixes LCP)
• Reduce JavaScript bundle size (fixes INP)

A Core Web Vitals checker pulls the field data Google actually ranks on, which often disagrees with your lab score. Why your Core Web Vitals won't improve explains that gap.

Step 5: Validate structured data

Structured data (JSON-LD) helps Google understand your content and can unlock rich snippets in search results. Check for:

• Valid JSON-LD syntax (a structured data validator checks this without a Google account)
• Correct schema types for your content (Article, Product, FAQPage, etc.)
• Required fields filled in (many schemas have mandatory properties)

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "How to Audit Your Website for SEO",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Your Name" },
  "datePublished": "2026-03-28"
}
</script>

Step 6: Check internal linking

Google discovers pages by following links. If important pages are buried deep in your site with no internal links pointing to them, they may never get crawled.

Look for:

• Orphan pages - pages with no internal links pointing to them
• Dead links - internal links that return 404, which a broken link checker will crawl for you
• Redirect chains - links that go through multiple redirects before reaching the final page, which a redirect checker traces hop by hop

The one-command version

Running through all six steps manually is thorough but time-consuming. If you want to check everything at once, LintPage covers steps 1 through 4 in a single 30-second scan - indexability, meta tags, headings, and performance checks included.