Checklist
59 checks, grouped and ordered so the expensive faults surface first. Indexing before anything else, because a page Google cannot see cannot be fixed by anything further down the list. Nothing to sign up for, and the spreadsheet version at the end is free.
By Hamza Rivera
Short answer: An SEO audit checks indexing first, then crawling, on-page, content, speed, links, local and measurement, in an order that surfaces the expensive faults early. A page Google cannot index cannot be fixed by anything further down the list. This checklist has 59 checks.
in 8 sections, in the order that finds the most.
Most audit checklists are a flat list of a hundred things in no particular order, which means the reader starts at the top and gives up somewhere around item thirty, having found nothing. The order below is deliberate. The first two sections contain the faults that silently delete a site from search, and they are the fastest to check.
Work down it. Anything you cannot answer is a finding on its own.
Every audit starts here. A page that is blocked, noindexed or canonicalised away is invisible no matter how good it is, and this is where the single most expensive faults hide.
What a crawler can reach, how fast it gives up, and whether your most important pages are buried behind five clicks.
Most on-page faults are template faults, which is good news: one fix corrects hundreds of pages. Sample three pages from each template rather than reading all of them.
The part most audits skip because it cannot be automated, and the part that most often explains why a technically perfect site does not rank.
Measured on real pages on a real phone, not on the home page on a desktop, because that is where the visitors are.
Both directions. Internal links are the half you control completely and the half most audits ignore.
For a business that serves an area, this section usually outweighs everything above it.
Last in the order and first in importance, because an audit you cannot measure the effect of is an opinion.
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether businesses still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
A full one once a year, and a short one each quarter covering indexing, crawl errors and Search Console coverage. That rhythm catches drift, which is what accumulates when nobody is doing anything wrong in particular.
The audits that actually save money are the unscheduled ones. Run the first two sections immediately after any of these, without waiting for the quarter to end: a redesign, a move to a new platform, a change of hosting or CDN, a new plugin with access to robots.txt or the head of the page, a certificate change, or any sudden fall in impressions in Search Console. Every one of those can put a noindex or a Disallow in front of a site that was working the day before, and the damage compounds quietly until somebody looks. If the file itself needs writing, the robots.txt generator writes it with the AI crawlers named one by one and refuses the line that empties a site.
The checklist above as a file you can fill in: one row per check, a result column that only takes pass, fail or not applicable, a column for the evidence (the address, the figure or the screenshot name, which is the one people leave out and the one that matters, because a finding with no URL cannot be verified or handed to anybody else), and beside every check where to look and what a fail costs.
Download the audit template (Excel)
It opens in Google Sheets as well. Eleven tabs. The first is a read-me and the second is the summary the client reads. Then the checks, in the order a fail costs enquiries: the enquiry path first, which no crawler can run because no crawler fills in a form, then indexing, on-page for the money pages, technical, content, local and links. Every fail is copied to a Findings tab with the page, the evidence, what it costs and the fix, and the Findings tab becomes the plan for the next thirty days, which becomes the first monthly report.
Keep the completed sheet. The second audit is far more useful than the first, because the difference between them is the only real evidence that anything changed. It is free, it is not gated behind an email address, and you can change anything in it.
Same list, done for you, with the findings ranked by what they cost rather than by how easy they were to find. You get the sheet and the evidence whether or not you go on to have the work done.
A full audit once a year for most sites, and a short one every quarter. Then an unscheduled one whenever something changes that could break indexing: a redesign, a platform migration, a change of hosting, a new plugin that writes to robots.txt, or a sudden fall in impressions in Search Console. The annual audit finds drift; the unscheduled one finds damage, and damage is more expensive.
Working through this list on a small site takes a day or two. On a large one the crawl alone takes longer, and the content section is the part that expands, because it cannot be automated and it is where the real answers usually are.
Yes, and the first two sections are worth doing whoever you hire afterwards. Indexing and crawl faults are objective, they are findable with free tools, and they are where the largest single losses tend to hide.
Search Console, which is free and non-negotiable, a crawler, and a page speed tool. Everything in the indexing, crawling and measurement sections can be done with those three. The content section needs judgement rather than a tool.
A technical audit covers the first two sections here plus speed: what a crawler can reach and read. A full SEO audit adds content, links, local and measurement, which is where most of the reasons a site does not rank actually live.
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