What does an SEO audit include?

A real SEO audit runs four passes over a site, crawl and indexation, on page and content, technical performance, and authority, and it ends in a prioritized fix list. If the deliverable is a ninety page tool export, you did not get an audit, you got a PDF.

Pass one: crawl and indexation

Can search engines reach your pages, and are they choosing to keep them? This pass covers robots rules, sitemaps, canonical tags, accidental noindex directives, redirect chains, orphan pages with no internal links pointing at them, and duplicate URLs created by parameters or pagination. Most of the biggest, cheapest wins live here.

Pass two: on page and content

Titles and meta descriptions, heading structure, whether each page has a clear single topic, thin or overlapping pages competing for the same query, and gaps where buyers are asking something you have never answered. This is also where structured data gets checked, because a page with no schema is harder for an answer engine to quote.

Pass three: technical performance

Page speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, image weight, third party scripts, HTTPS and mixed content, and broken links. Performance is a small ranking input and a large conversion input, which is the better reason to fix it.

Pass four: authority and competition

Who links to you, who links to the competitors beating you, what those competitors publish that you do not, and whether your business information is consistent everywhere it appears. Consistency matters more than volume here.

The deliverable

A ranked list of fixes with an effort estimate and an expected impact for each, split into what we can do, what your developer has to do, and what can wait. It should be short enough that someone actually works through it. We run this as part of SEO engagements and before any redesign.