How To Do An SEO Audit: 9 Things To Check For

Most small business websites are never properly checked after launch. Pages get added, plugins get updated, a developer changes the theme, and nobody notices that the service page which used to bring in enquiries has quietly dropped out of Google’s index. An SEO audit is the routine health check that catches these problems before they cost you customers.

This guide explains how to do an SEO audit yourself, step by step. It starts with why audits matter and what to prepare, then walks through the nine things to check, from indexing and crawlability to content, structured data and local signals. You will also get a comparison table of free tools, a practical audit schedule for a small team and the mistakes that make audits less useful than they should be.

Why an SEO audit matters for a small business

An audit is not about chasing a perfect score in a tool. It is about answering three practical questions: can Google find and understand your important pages, are those pages genuinely useful to the people searching, and is anything broken that stops visitors from becoming enquiries?

In our experience, regular audits are worth the effort for several reasons:

• Silent problems are common. A stray noindex tag, a broken redirect after a redesign or a blocked folder in robots.txt can remove pages from search without any visible error on the site.
• Websites drift. Over a year or two, content goes out of date, internal links break and new pages compete with old ones for the same searches.
• Platforms change. Google updates its guidance and features, and what worked when your site launched may no longer be the best approach.
• It focuses spending. An audit gives you a prioritised list, so developer time and budget go to the fixes that matter rather than to whatever a tool flags in red.
• It protects you before big changes. Auditing before a redesign or platform move gives you a baseline; our SEO migration checklist covers that situation in depth.
• It reveals opportunities, not just faults. Pages that already earn impressions but few clicks are often the quickest wins.

Before you start: tools and a baseline

You can run a useful audit with free tools. At minimum, set up the following before you begin:

• Google Search Console, verified for your domain, so you can see indexing, search performance and Core Web Vitals data.
• Google Analytics 4, with enquiry actions (form submissions, calls, WhatsApp clicks) recorded as key events.
• A site crawler, which visits every page like a search engine and lists titles, status codes and links. Several reputable crawlers have free tiers suitable for small sites.
• PageSpeed Insights, for checking individual pages on mobile.
• A spreadsheet to record each issue, its affected pages, its priority and who owns the fix.

Write down a baseline before changing anything: clicks and impressions over the last three months, the number of indexed pages and monthly enquiries. Without a baseline, you will not know whether your fixes worked.

How to do an SEO audit: 9 things to check

Work through these checks in order. The early ones deal with whether Google can reach your pages at all, so fixing them first makes the later checks meaningful.

1. Indexing: are your important pages in Google?

Open the Page indexing report in Search Console. It shows how many of your pages are indexed and why others are not. Pay attention to reasons such as “Excluded by noindex tag”, “Blocked by robots.txt”, “Not found (404)” and “Crawled – currently not indexed”. Google notes that the last status means it crawled the page but chose not to index it for now, which often points to thin or duplicated content rather than a technical fault.

Then list your ten to twenty most important pages (home page, core services, top products, key locations) and check each with the URL Inspection tool. If any of these is missing from the index, that is your highest priority.

2. Crawlability: robots.txt, sitemaps and noindex rules

Check that your robots.txt file is not blocking folders you want in search. Google’s robots.txt introduction explains that it controls crawling, not indexing, so it is the wrong tool for hiding pages. Next, confirm your XML sitemap lists only live, canonical pages you want indexed and that it is submitted in Search Console; our guide on why sitemaps matter explains what belongs in one. Finally, crawl the site and look for noindex tags on pages that should be public, a common leftover from a staging site.

3. Site structure and internal linking

Search engines and people both rely on links to understand which pages matter. Use your crawler to find orphan pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them) and important pages buried four or five clicks from the home page. Check that service pages link to related services and that articles link to the services they support. Our guides to organising your site structure and using internal links well go deeper.

4. Mobile experience and page speed

Most Singapore customers will meet your site on a phone, often over mobile data. Test your key pages on a real mid-range phone and in PageSpeed Insights. Google’s Core Web Vitals give three measures with published “good” thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, assessed at the 75th percentile of visits. Search Console’s Core Web Vitals report shows which groups of pages fall short using real-user data, where enough data exists.

Beyond the numbers, check the basics: text readable without zooming, buttons easy to tap, no pop-ups covering the content and a phone number or WhatsApp link that works with one tap.

5. Status codes, redirects, HTTPS and duplicates

Your crawler will list every URL with its status code. Look for:

• Broken internal links returning 404 errors.
• Redirect chains (one redirect leading to another) and redirect loops.
• Pages still served over HTTP, or mixed HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site.
• Duplicate versions of the same page (with and without www, trailing slashes, tracking parameters) that lack a consistent canonical tag.

Clean, consistent URLs make all of this easier; see our notes on SEO-friendly URL structure.

6. Titles, meta descriptions and headings

Export every page title and meta description from your crawler. Flag titles that are missing, duplicated across pages, far too long or too vague (“Home”, “Services”). Each important page should have a unique, descriptive title and a single main heading that matches what the page is about. Google’s SEO Starter Guide explains how titles and snippets are used in results. For a full list of page-level factors, see our guide to on-page SEO elements.

7. Content quality, search intent and overlap

This is the check tools cannot do for you. For each important page, ask whether it genuinely answers what a searcher wants better than the pages already ranking. Look for:

• Thin pages with a few lines of generic text, such as location pages that only swap the estate name.
• Out-of-date information: old prices, discontinued services, expired promotions, last year’s public holiday hours.
• Overlapping pages targeting the same search, which can split signals between them. Consider merging or clearly differentiating them.
• Missing trust details: who is behind the business, real contact details, credentials where relevant and honest information about process and price factors.

In Search Console’s Performance report, filter for pages with many impressions but a low click-through rate. These often need a clearer title or a better match to what people are searching for.

8. Structured data and how you appear in results

Structured data helps Google understand your content and can make pages eligible for richer search results. Google’s introduction to structured data lists the supported types. Check that any markup on your site (for example Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article or Breadcrumb) is valid in Google’s Rich Results Test and that it matches what is visible on the page. Do not mark up reviews or ratings that are not genuinely shown to visitors; Google treats misleading markup as a policy issue.

9. Off-page signals and local presence

Finally, look beyond your own site. In Search Console’s Links report, review which sites link to you and whether any links look paid or spammy; our explainer on dofollow and nofollow links explains how paid links should be marked. For local businesses, check your Google Business Profile: correct category, address or service area, phone number, opening hours and recent photos, all consistent with your website. Our Google Business Profile guide walks through each field.

Free audit tools compared

A practical SEO audit schedule for a small team

For a site of up to a few hundred pages, this plan fits into about two weeks of part-time effort.

1. Day 1 – Prepare (marketing lead). Confirm Search Console and GA4 access, record the baseline and create the issues spreadsheet.
2. Days 2–3 – Technical checks 1, 2 and 5 (web developer). Review indexing, robots.txt, sitemap and status codes. Fix anything that blocks important pages straight away.
3. Days 4–5 – Structure and speed, checks 3 and 4 (web developer). Map internal links, list orphan pages and test the top pages on mobile.
4. Days 6–8 – Page and content review, checks 6 and 7 (owner and marketing lead). Go through the top twenty pages for titles, headings, accuracy and usefulness. The owner’s knowledge of customers matters most here.
5. Day 9 – Structured data and local, checks 8 and 9 (marketing lead). Validate markup and update the Business Profile.
6. Day 10 – Prioritise (owner). Score each issue by impact and effort. Fix high-impact, low-effort items first and schedule the rest.
7. Weeks 4–12 – Measure (marketing lead). Compare Search Console and enquiry data against the baseline using a short list of SEO KPIs. Repeat a lighter audit every quarter and a full one each year or before any redesign.

Online shops have extra checks around categories, filters and product variants; our e-commerce SEO checklist adds those.

How AI can help with SEO audits

Audits involve a lot of repetitive data handling, which suits automation. AI tools can help by:

• Running scheduled crawls and alerting you when pages drop out of the index or start returning errors.
• Summarising Search Console data into a short list of pages that gained or lost visibility.
• Drafting improved titles and meta descriptions for a person to review.
• Flagging pages with outdated dates, prices or broken links.
• Grouping hundreds of crawler warnings by likely impact so you are not overwhelmed.

The limits are important. Tools report symptoms; they cannot always tell you why a page is not indexed or whether content truly helps your customers. Automated “health scores” are useful for tracking change but are not a Google metric. AI can also misread context, so keep a person in charge of decisions and of anything published to the live site.

Marketing2u’s AI SEO Agent runs these checks on a schedule, including a site crawler, Core Web Vitals, robots.txt and sitemap checks and a six-part health score covering indexing, on-page, content depth, internal linking, technical and off-page. It applies only low-risk fixes such as meta descriptions and alt text, within the approval level you choose, and records a before-and-after history with undo.

Common SEO audit mistakes to avoid

• Treating every tool warning as urgent. Many flagged items have little real impact. Prioritise by effect on important pages and enquiries.
• Auditing without a baseline. If you do not record where you started, you cannot judge what improved.
• Skipping the content review. Technical fixes help Google reach your pages; they do not make weak pages worth ranking.
• Blocking pages with robots.txt to remove them from search. Use noindex or remove the page instead.
• Fixing everything at once. Making many changes together makes it hard to see what worked. Batch fixes and note the dates.
• Giving full admin access to an outside auditor. Read-only Search Console and analytics access is usually enough for an audit.
• Auditing once and forgetting. Put the next review in the calendar before you finish this one.

Making your SEO audit a habit

Knowing how to do an SEO audit is less about mastering tools and more about following a steady order: make sure Google can reach your important pages, make sure those pages are fast and clear on mobile, make sure the content genuinely helps searchers, and then look at signals from beyond your site. Nine checks, done honestly and repeated regularly, will catch most problems that hold a small business website back.

A good first step is to open Search Console today, look at the Page indexing report and check that your five most important pages are indexed. If they are not, you have found the most valuable fix on your list.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I do an SEO audit?

For most small business websites, a light check each quarter and a full audit once a year is a sensible rhythm. Run an extra audit before and after any redesign, platform change or domain move. Search Console alerts can cover the weeks in between.

Can I do an SEO audit myself for free?

Yes. Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test and the free tier of a site crawler cover most of the nine checks for a small site. The content review relies mainly on your own knowledge of customers, which no tool can replace.

How long does an SEO audit take?

For a site with up to a few hundred pages, a thorough first audit typically takes one to two weeks of part-time effort, including the content review. Later audits are faster because you already have a baseline and a list of known issues.

What is the most important part of an SEO audit?

Start with indexing. If your important pages are not in Google’s index, no other improvement will help them appear. After that, the content review usually matters most, because technical fixes only help pages that are genuinely useful to searchers.

Sources and further reading

• Search Console Help: Page indexing report
• web.dev: Web Vitals
• Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide
• Google Search Central: Introduction to robots.txt
• Google Search Central: Introduction to structured data markup

Related guides

• Hacked Website? How Security Problems Hurt SEO and How to Recover
• 23-Step SEO Migration Checklist For A Seamless Website Migration
• Best Site Structure for SEO: How to Organise Your Website for Rankings
• On-Page SEO Elements: 15 Key Factors For Better Rankings
• How Important Is Sitemap For SEO? Key To Better Rankings

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