Most “complete” SEO audit checklists online have 47, 55, or even 70 items. They are thorough. They are also, for most people running a single website, completely impractical. By item 12 you are deep in backlink spam scores and hreflang configuration, and the actual reason your site isn’t ranking \u2014 a missing sitemap, or a noindex tag nobody remembers adding \u2014 is buried somewhere in the list, unaddressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a shorter list. Twenty-five checks, organised by what actually matters first. If you work through this in order, you will catch the issue causing 80% of the damage before you get anywhere near the advanced items that only matter once the fundamentals are solid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You do not need to pay for anything to run through this list. Every check below uses either a free tool, a built-in browser feature, or a five-second manual look at your own site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before changing anything, write down four numbers so you can measure whether your fixes worked. Open Google Search Console and note your current total clicks, total impressions, and average position over the last 28 days. Then open Google Analytics (or whatever analytics tool you use) and note your current organic sessions for the same period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without this baseline, you have no way to know in a month whether anything you changed actually helped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If Google cannot find or access your pages, nothing else on this list matters. Start here, every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Check whether your site is actually indexed.<\/strong> Type 2. Confirm your sitemap exists and is current.<\/strong> Visit 3. Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console.<\/strong> Search Console \u2192 Sitemaps \u2192 enter the URL \u2192 Submit. If it’s already submitted, check the “Last read” date. If that date is more than two weeks old and you’ve published new content since, something is preventing Google from re-crawling it regularly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4. Check robots.txt isn’t blocking anything important.<\/strong> Visit 5. Confirm there’s no accidental noindex on key pages.<\/strong> Right-click any important page \u2192 View Page Source \u2192 search for 6. Check your HTTP status codes.<\/strong> Run your homepage and your top 5 pages through httpstatus.io<\/a> (free). Every important page should return a 200. Watch for unexpected 404s, or 301 redirect chains longer than one hop \u2014 each extra redirect wastes crawl budget and slows the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 7. Look for orphan pages.<\/strong> An orphan page is one with no internal links pointing to it anywhere on your site. If a page isn’t linked from your navigation, your homepage, or any other content, Google has no path to find it through normal crawling \u2014 it depends entirely on the sitemap, which is a weaker signal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 8. Check Search Console’s Coverage report for errors.<\/strong> Search Console \u2192 Indexing \u2192 Pages. Look at the “Why pages aren’t indexed” breakdown. Common culprits: “Crawled \u2014 currently not indexed” (content quality or duplication issue), “Discovered \u2014 currently not indexed” (crawl budget issue), and “Excluded by noindex tag” (a setting issue you can fix immediately).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once Google can find your pages, the next question is whether visiting them is a good experience \u2014 for users and for the algorithm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 9. Check your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).<\/strong> Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights<\/a> on the mobile tab specifically. LCP under 2.5 seconds is good. Over 4 seconds is poor, and it is very likely costing you both rankings and conversions \u2014 Portent’s 2025 conversion research found that every additional second of load delay reduces conversions by roughly 4.4%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 10. Check your Interaction to Next Paint (INP).<\/strong> Same tool, same report. INP under 200 milliseconds is good. This metric replaced First Input Delay in March 2024 and measures how responsive your site feels when someone actually clicks or taps something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 11. Check your Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).<\/strong> Still the same report. CLS under 0.1 is good. If your score is high, the most common cause is images without defined width and height attributes, or a cookie banner that pushes content down after the page has already loaded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the full walkthrough of how to fix any of these three metrics specifically \u2014 including exact code snippets \u2014 see our complete Core Web Vitals guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 12. Test on an actual mid-range phone, not just your laptop.<\/strong> PageSpeed Insights simulates a mid-range device on a throttled connection deliberately, because that’s a more realistic picture of your average visitor than your own fast wifi and modern laptop. If you’ve never tested your site this way, your perception of how fast your site “feels” is probably wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 13. Check for mixed content warnings.<\/strong> Open your site in Chrome, press F12 to open DevTools, and check the Console tab for any “mixed content” warnings. These happen when an HTTPS page loads an HTTP resource, and they can trigger browser security warnings that scare visitors away before they read a word of your content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With crawlability and page experience handled, this is where most of the actual ranking signal lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 14. Check every page has a unique title tag.<\/strong> View the source of your top 10 pages and confirm no two have identical 15. Check title tag length.<\/strong> Title tags between 50 and 60 characters display fully in search results without truncation. Run yours through a free SERP snippet preview tool<\/a> to see exactly how they’ll appear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 16. Check every key page has a meta description.<\/strong> Missing meta descriptions mean Google writes its own \u2014 usually pulling an awkward sentence fragment from the page rather than the persuasive summary you’d write yourself. Aim for 150\u2013160 characters that genuinely describe the page and encourage a click.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 17. Check your heading structure.<\/strong> Every page should have exactly one H1. Below it, H2s and H3s should follow a logical hierarchy \u2014 not skip levels, not be used purely for visual styling unrelated to content structure. View source or use your browser’s accessibility inspector to check this quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 18. Check image alt text.<\/strong> Missing alt text is one of the single most common on-page issues found across audited websites \u2014 one industry analysis found it present in roughly 78% of all on-page issues flagged. Beyond accessibility, alt text gives Google context about images it cannot otherwise interpret, and it matters for image search visibility too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 19. Check for thin or duplicate content.<\/strong> Pages with very little unique text, or pages that are near-copies of each other (common with location pages or filtered product pages) dilute your site’s overall authority. If two pages are targeting the same intent, consider merging them rather than letting them compete with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 20. Check your internal linking.<\/strong> Open your three most important pages and count how many other pages on your site link to each of them. If the answer is zero or close to it, you’re not distributing authority to the pages that matter most for your business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the section almost no other free SEO checklist online includes properly, and it’s increasingly the reason traffic doesn’t convert even when rankings look fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 21. Check whether AI crawlers can access your site.<\/strong> Open your robots.txt again and look specifically for any block on 22. Check for FAQ schema on your key pages.<\/strong> View source and search for 23. Check whether your headings are phrased as questions.<\/strong> Answer engines parse heading structure to match user queries. A heading like “What is X?” is far more likely to be matched and cited than a generic heading like “Overview.” Look at your top 5 pages and count how many headings are genuinely phrased as the question a reader would type.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 24. Check whether your content answers the question immediately.<\/strong> Below each heading, is there a direct, 40\u201360 word answer in the first two sentences \u2014 or does the page meander for several paragraphs before getting to the point? AI systems extracting answers strongly prefer the former.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For a full breakdown of how this works and why it matters, our AEO guide<\/a> covers every signal in detail, and you can check your AEO score directly with our free AEO checker<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 25. Check whether your brand is mentioned anywhere else on the web.<\/strong> Search your brand name in Google with quotes around it. Beyond your own site, how many other places mention you \u2014 directories, forums, comparison articles, reviews? Research from Ahrefs analysing 76 million AI Overviews found that brand mentions correlate with AI citation probability more strongly than backlinks do. If your brand name returns almost nothing outside your own domain, that’s a real gap for AI visibility specifically. Our GEO guide<\/a> covers what to do about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nsite:yourdomain.com<\/code> into Google. If you see your pages listed, you’re indexed. If you see nothing or far fewer pages than you have published, that’s your first and most urgent problem to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\nyourdomain.com\/sitemap.xml<\/code> or yourdomain.com\/sitemap_index.xml<\/code> directly in your browser. It should load and list your pages. If it 404s, your sitemap either doesn’t exist or is at a different URL \u2014 check your SEO plugin settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\nyourdomain.com\/robots.txt<\/code>. Look for any Disallow:<\/code> line. A single Disallow: \/<\/code> blocks your entire site from being crawled \u2014 this single line is one of the most common causes of a site that “should” rank but doesn’t show up anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\nnoindex<\/code>. If you find <meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex\"><\/code> on a page that should be ranking, this is silently telling Google to ignore it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nPart 2: Page experience and Core Web Vitals (5 checks)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nPart 3: On-page fundamentals (7 checks)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<title><\/code> tags. Duplicate titles confuse Google about which page should rank for what, and are one of the most common on-page issues found across audited sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nPart 4: AI search readiness (5 checks \u2014 the part most checklists skip)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
GPTBot<\/code>, PerplexityBot<\/code>, Google-Extended<\/code>, or similar AI crawler user-agents. If these are blocked, your content cannot be retrieved or cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews \u2014 regardless of how good the content is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\"@type\": \"FAQPage\"<\/code>. If it’s missing from pages that answer common questions, you’re leaving a significant AI citation opportunity unclaimed. Validate any schema you do have at Google’s Rich Results Test<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nQuick reference: the full checklist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n