An SEO audit is meant to answer one question: why is this site not getting the traffic it should, and what has to change? Everything else is padding.
Here is what we actually check, and why each part matters.
Technical foundations
If Google cannot crawl a page properly, nothing else you do to it counts.
- Indexing — how many pages Google has, versus how many you meant to publish. A mismatch here is usually the biggest single problem on a site.
- Speed — measured on a real connection, not a lab score. Slow pages lose people before the content loads.
- Mobile rendering — most UK traffic is now on a phone. If the layout breaks there, it breaks for the majority.
- Redirects and errors — chains, loops, and pages that quietly return the wrong status code.
What is on the pages
- Titles and descriptions that are missing, duplicated, or long enough to be cut off in results.
- Headings that describe the page rather than decorate it.
- Thin pages that exist but say nothing — often the leftovers of an old site.
Links
Both directions matter: what points at you, and how your own pages connect to each other. Internal links are the part most audits skip, and the part you can actually fix this week.
What you should get at the end
Not a PDF. A list of specific changes, ordered by what will move the numbers first, with an honest note on which ones need a developer and which you can do yourself.
If an audit does not tell you what to do on Monday morning, it was not an audit — it was a report.