By SureRank Team

Most SEO audits lie to you.

Not intentionally. But when you run your site through a free audit tool and get back a report saying “347 issues found” with broken image alt text sitting next to a robots.txt that’s blocking your entire site from Google that report has failed you. It gave you a number instead of a diagnosis. It created urgency without priority. And it left you staring at a spreadsheet of problems with no clear idea of where to start or what actually matters.

A real SEO audit doesn’t work like that.

A real audit is a structured diagnostic, not a scorecard. It tells you whether your site can be found, whether it deserves to rank, and specifically what’s standing between your current position and where you should be. It separates the issues that are actively costing you traffic right now from the ones that are worth fixing over time.

That’s what this guide covers.

Five steps, free tools, specific instructions and a clear-eyed explanation of what each step is actually looking for and why. By the end, you’ll have a complete picture of your site’s SEO health and a prioritised action list, not a number.

What a Real SEO Audit Actually Covers (vs. What Most Guides Skip)

Before the steps, a note on scope because most SEO audit guides skip significant territory.

A complete WordPress SEO audit covers five distinct layers:

Crawlability and indexing: Can Google find and index your pages? Before any other question is worth asking, this one needs a clear answer. A site with indexing problems is invisible to search. Everything else is irrelevant until this is confirmed.

On-page optimisation: Are your titles, meta descriptions, headings, content, and keyword signals set correctly on each page? This is the layer most people think of first when they hear “SEO audit.”

Technical health: Is your site fast enough, mobile-friendly, structurally clean, and free of the backend issues that suppress rankings regardless of content quality?

Content quality and competitiveness: Does your content actually deserve to rank, relative to what’s already out there for your target keywords? This is the layer most tool-generated audit reports skip entirely — because a crawler can check for missing meta descriptions but can’t tell you whether your content is too thin to compete.

Backlink profile: What external sites are pointing to yours, and are those links helping or quietly hurting your authority?

Most free audit reports cover layer two and a partial version of layer three. Most guides that walk you through “how to do an SEO audit” spend the majority of their time on on-page factors and dedicate a paragraph to the rest.

This guide covers all five layers in sequence, because the sequence matters. A technical issue blocking indexing makes your on-page work irrelevant. Thin content makes backlinks less effective. The layers build on each other, and auditing them out of order produces incomplete findings.

Work through these steps in order.

Step 1: Crawl Your Site, What to Look For

The first step in any serious SEO audit is crawling your own site the way Google does.

A crawler visits every URL on your site, follows every link, and records what it finds at each one broken pages, redirect chains, missing tags, duplicate content, orphaned pages. Done manually, this would take weeks on a medium-sized site. Done with a crawler, it takes minutes.

Tool to use (free): Screaming Frog SEO Spider The free version crawls up to 500 URLs and is the closest publicly available tool to how Google actually crawls a site. Download it, enter your domain, and run the crawl.

What to look for during the crawl:

4xx errors (broken pages). These are pages that return an error when accessed most commonly 404s, which mean the page doesn’t exist. Every 404 on your site is a dead end for both users and crawlers. If any of those broken pages used to have backlinks pointing to them, those links are now delivering their authority to nothing. Export the full 4xx list and decide for each URL: restore the page, or set up a 301 redirect to the most relevant existing page.

Redirect chains and loops. A redirect chain is when URL A redirects to URL B, which redirects to URL C. Each hop adds load time and dilutes the authority passing through the chain. Google recommends keeping redirects to a single hop. Chains of three or more are worth cleaning up. Redirect loops where a URL eventually redirects back to itself are a crawl error that can prevent pages from being indexed.

Pages with missing or duplicate title tags. Screaming Frog flags these in the Page Titles tab. Missing titles leave Google to choose its own which it will, usually pulling something from the page body that doesn’t serve your ranking intent. Duplicate titles tell Google you have two pages about the same thing, which creates an indexing decision problem.

Pages with missing or duplicate meta descriptions. Research consistently shows that around 34% of pages are missing meta descriptions. While not a direct ranking factor, a missing description leaves Google to pull its own snippet which is frequently less compelling than what you’d write intentionally and less likely to match search intent precisely.

Pages with thin content (very low word count). Screaming Frog’s word count column flags pages with unusually low content. These aren’t automatically a problem as a contact page has few words by design but post pages and category pages with under 300 words are candidates for consolidation or expansion.

Orphaned pages. Pages that have no internal links pointing to them from the rest of the site. Google can find them via your sitemap, but they receive no internal PageRank from the rest of your content. These are both an indexing risk and a wasted ranking opportunity.

Redirect your crawl findings into two lists: things to fix immediately (broken pages, redirect loops, completely missing titles), and things to improve over time (thin content, duplicate descriptions, missing alt text at scale). Not everything the crawler surfaces is urgent. The crawler’s job is to surface everything. Your job is to triage it.

Step 2: Indexing Health Check in Google Search Console

If Step 1 tells you what’s on your site, Step 2 tells you what Google has actually done with it.

These are two different things. A page can exist on your site without being in Google’s index. A page can be indexed without ranking for anything. Understanding where your pages sit in this picture is the foundation of everything else in the audit.

Tool to use (free): Google Search Console

Go to Indexing → Pages in the left navigation.

This view shows a breakdown of every URL Google has encountered on your site, sorted into categories:

“Indexed” pages, these are in Google’s index and eligible to rank. The number here should be close to the number of pages on your site that you actually want indexed.

“Not indexed” pages, these exist on your site but Google has chosen not to include in its index. Click through the specific reason categories:

“Excluded by noindex tag” A no-index directive was found on the page. This is intentional on pages like thank-you pages, login pages, and author archives. It’s a serious problem on any page you want to rank.

“Crawled – currently not indexed”, Google found the page but decided it wasn’t worth adding to the index. This is the category that hurts the most to see, because it means Google made an active judgment call against your content. Common causes: thin content, too much similarity to other pages on your site, or low perceived quality. These pages need content improvement, not technical fixes.

“Discovered – currently not indexed”, Google knows the page exists but hasn’t crawled it yet. This can be a crawl budget issue on large sites, or simply a matter of the page being too new. Submitting the URL directly via the URL Inspection tool speeds this up.

“Duplicate – submitted URL not selected as canonical”, Google has decided another URL is the better version of this page and is indexing that one instead. If the canonical it chose is correct, this is fine. If it chose a non-preferred version of your page, you have a canonicalisation problem to fix.

The URL Inspection tool is your per-page diagnostic.

Paste any specific page URL at the top of Search Console. The resulting report tells you: indexed or not, last crawl date, whether a canonical is set and which URL Google considers canonical, and whether any mobile usability or schema issues were detected on that specific page.

For any important page that isn’t indexed, your cornerstone content, your highest-value landing pages, your product pages, use the “Request Indexing” button directly from this screen. This doesn’t guarantee indexing immediately, but it places the page in the priority crawl queue.

Check your Performance data before leaving the Search Console.

Go to Performance → Search Results. Export the full list of queries your site appears for, sorted by impressions.

Now look for two patterns:

High impressions, very low CTR, Google is showing your page but nobody’s clicking. This is almost always a title tag or meta description problem. The page is relevant to the query; the snippet just isn’t compelling enough to earn the click. These are your quickest wins. Rewriting the title and description for these pages can produce measurable traffic increases within two to three weeks without changing a word of the content.

Positions 8–20 for valuable keywords, These are your best ranking opportunities. You’re already on Google’s radar for these queries; you just need to push through to page one. A content improvement, additional internal links, or better on-page optimisation on those specific pages is usually enough to move them.

Step 3: On-Page Audit: Titles, Metas, Headings, Content

With a clear picture of crawlability and indexing, you can now audit the on-page factors that determine how well your indexed pages compete.

Work through these in order of impact.

Title tags, audit for three things:

Keyword presence in the first three words. Pages where the title buries the keyword mid-sentence or at the end are losing ranking weight. Rewrite to front-load the keyword.

Length within 51–60 characters. Titles outside this range are either getting rewritten by Google (too short) or truncated in results (too long). Both reduce your control over what searchers see.

Uniqueness. Every page should have a unique title. Pages sharing titles create indexing conflicts. Screaming Frog’s duplicate titles report surfaces in seconds.

Meta descriptions, audit for three things:

Presence. Any page without a meta description is leaving its snippet to Google’s discretion. That’s rarely ideal.

Intent match. Read each description as a searcher would. Does it tell you what the page covers and give you a reason to click? Generic descriptions (“Read our article about on-page SEO”) earn generic results.

Length within 150–160 characters. Anything longer gets truncated, often mid-sentence, which looks incomplete in search results and reduces CTR.

Heading structure, audit for two things:

One H1 per page, containing the primary keyword. Multiple H1s confuse Google’s understanding of the page’s main topic. Zero H1s are a missed signal entirely.

Logical H2 and H3 nesting. Headings should reflect content hierarchy, not visual styling preferences. A page that jumps from H1 to H4 or uses H3s before H2s is sending confused structural signals.

Content quality, this is the layer the tools can’t fully audit for you.

For your most important pages, the ones targeting your highest-value keywords, open them alongside the top three Google results for their target keyword and ask honestly:

Does my content cover the same topics as theirs? Does it go deeper on the specifics? Does it answer the follow-up questions a reader would have? Is it more current, more detailed, or more useful in any meaningful dimension?

If the answer to any of these is no, you’ve found a content gap. A competitor outranking you on a keyword despite weaker backlinks is almost always doing so because their content is more comprehensively aligned with what searchers want.

This is also where internal linking strategy reveals its impact. Pull up your most important posts and check how many internal links from other pages point to each one. Fewer than three incoming internal links on a cornerstone post is a problem, it means the post is getting almost no internal authority from the rest of your site, and improving that requires no content changes at all.

Step 4: Technical Audit: Speed, Mobile, Schema, Robots.txt

Technical SEO issues are the most commonly under-audited layer, and the most likely to produce invisible, persistent ranking suppression that no amount of content improvement will fix.

Core Web Vitals – use Google PageSpeed Insights (free)

Go to pagespeed.web.dev and run your homepage and your three most important posts through the tool. You’re looking at three metrics:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): How long until the main content of the page loads. Target: under 2.5 seconds. If you’re over this, the most common causes are uncompressed images, render-blocking JavaScript, or slow server response time.

INP (Interaction to Next Paint): How quickly the page responds when someone interacts with it. Target: under 200 milliseconds. High INP scores are most commonly caused by too many third-party scripts, analytics tools, chat widgets, advertising pixels, loading on the page.

CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): How much the page layout jumps around while loading. Target: below 0.1. The most common cause is images loading without declared dimensions, which causes content to shift as images push other elements around.

Pages that fail Core Web Vitals are actively being outranked by equivalent pages that pass, all else being equal. Google confirmed this as a ranking signal in the 2023 core update. Fix failing pages before investing further in content for those URLs.

Mobile usability – check Google Search Console

Go to Experience → Core Web Vitals in Search Console. This shows real user data from actual visitors, not just a simulated test, making it more accurate than PageSpeed Insights alone. Any URLs flagged as “Poor” on mobile are prioritised for fixing, Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning the mobile version of your site is what gets evaluated for ranking.

Robots.txt – inspect and verify

Access your robots.txt file by going to yourwebsite.com/robots.txt in a browser. You’re looking for any Disallow: directives that are broader than intended. A robots.txt that reads Disallow: / is blocking your entire site from Google. This happens more often than you’d expect, typically from a staging site setting that was never reverted.

Common legitimate robots.txt entries block /wp-admin/ (your backend), /wp-includes/ (WordPress core files), and specific directories that have no public-facing value. If your content directories are blocked, that’s an emergency fix.

Check your robots.txt against Google’s own tester: In Search Console, go to Settings → robots.txt. Google’s tester shows you exactly how it interprets your file and lets you test specific URLs to confirm they’re accessible.

Schema markup – verify with Google’s Rich Results Test

Go to search.google.com/test/rich-results and test your most important pages. The tool shows which schema types Google detected, whether they’re valid, and whether the page is eligible for rich results (expanded search features like star ratings, FAQ boxes, or article bylines).

For blog posts, the baseline is Article schema. It’s one of the most consistent positive signals for content freshness and author authority. For posts with a FAQ section, FAQ schema expands your SERP presence significantly, a single result with FAQ rich results can take up three to four times the vertical space of a standard result.

If your schema is missing or invalid, you’re not eligible for these features. SureRank applies Article schema automatically to every published post. FAQ schema is available through the schema builder without touching code.

XML sitemap — confirm it exists and is up to date

Access your sitemap at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml or yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml. Confirm it loads and contains your important pages. Then go to Indexing → Sitemaps in Search Console and verify the sitemap is submitted, and check for any errors or warnings Google has flagged against it.

A sitemap that contains 404 URLs, noindexed URLs, or pages you don’t want indexed creates noise that can slow down Google’s crawl of your site. Sitemaps should reflect only the pages you genuinely want indexed.

Step 5: Backlink Profile Check

Backlinks remain one of Google’s most significant ranking signals. But the question an audit needs to answer isn’t just “how many backlinks do I have?” It’s “what kind, from where, and are any of them causing harm?”

Tool to use (free): Google Search Console Link Report + Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker

In Search Console, go to Links → External Links. This shows the external sites linking to your domain. It’s not a comprehensive backlink database, Search Console only shows a portion of your link profile, but it’s authoritative, because it shows links Google has actually discovered and credited.

For a more complete picture, use Ahrefs’ free backlink checker (ahrefs.com/backlink-checker). Enter your domain and it returns the top 100 backlinks pointing to your site, along with domain authority scores for each linking site.

What you’re assessing:

Authority and relevance of linking domains. Links from respected, relevant sites in your niche pass the most meaningful authority. A backlink from a respected industry publication is worth significantly more than fifty links from unrelated or low-quality sites.

Anchor text distribution. Your backlink profile should have a natural mix of branded anchor text (your site name or brand), generic anchors (“click here,” “this article”), URL anchors (your literal URL), and a smaller proportion of keyword-rich anchors. A profile that’s heavily dominated by exact-match keyword anchors looks manipulated to Google’s algorithms.

Any obviously toxic links. Links from link farms, paid link directories, private blog networks, or sites with no legitimate purpose. These don’t always actively harm rankings, Google ignores many of them, but a high concentration can trigger scrutiny. If you have a history of link building through services or large numbers of links from identical-looking sites, this is worth investigating carefully.

What most audit guides skip here: your backlink audit isn’t just about what you have, it’s about identifying the gap between your profile and your competitors’. For any keyword you’re struggling to rank for, open the top two or three ranking pages and check their backlink profiles. The gap between their domain authority and yours, and the quality of the links pointing to their specific pages, tells you roughly how much link acquisition work is required to compete.

If your competitors on a target keyword have dozens of high-authority backlinks to their ranking page and yours has two, content improvements alone won’t close the gap. Link acquisition has to be part of the strategy.

How to Use SureRank’s Built-In Site Audit to Automate Steps 1–5

Everything in this guide can be executed with the free tools described above. The full process, Screaming Frog crawl, Search Console analysis, PageSpeed testing, robots.txt verification, schema checking, backlink review, takes between three and six hours on a medium-sized site when done manually.

That’s a significant investment, which is why most WordPress site owners do it once, find it overwhelming, and don’t do it again for a year. And a lot changes in a year.

SureRank’s Site SEO Analysis was built to solve this for WordPress specifically, bringing the audit inside the plugin so it runs where you already manage your site, not in six different browser tabs.

Here’s what it covers and how it maps to each step in this guide:

Crawl equivalent (Step 1): SureRank’s site audit scans your WordPress installation for the issues a crawler would flag, missing meta tags, canonical tag problems, noindex settings, sitemap status, robots.txt configuration, and surfaces them in plain language inside the WordPress dashboard. No crawler download, no 500-URL cap, no export-to-spreadsheet required.

Indexing signals (Step 2): SureRank connects directly to Google Search Console and surfaces your Search Console performance data inside WordPress, including which pages have high impressions and low CTR (your quick-win opportunities) and which pages aren’t indexed.

On-page audit (Step 3): The on-page scoring panel runs against every page and post, checking title keyword presence, meta description length and keyword inclusion, heading structure, keyword placement in the first 100 words, internal link count, readability score, and schema status. Every check we covered in Step 3, live and per-page, while you’re editing.

Technical checks (Step 4): The site audit flags HTTPS status, canonical tag correctness, sitemap coverage, and robots.txt accessibility from the same dashboard. For Core Web Vitals, SureRank surfaces your Search Console speed data rather than requiring a separate tool visit.

Schema (Step 4): Article schema is applied automatically to every post, no manual configuration, no separate schema plugin. FAQ schema is available through the on-page panel for any post where it’s relevant.

Where SureRank Pro goes further:

With SureRank Pro, the audit becomes active rather than diagnostic. The AI layer doesn’t just find issues, it fixes them.

Missing meta descriptions across fifty posts? SureRank’s AI generates them from your actual page content in bulk, one click, not fifty. Images missing alt text across your entire media library? The same AI generates accurate, contextually appropriate alt text for your full image library, not just new uploads going forward.

The AI internal link suggestions surface opportunities to link between existing posts as you edit, turning the orphaned-content problem from a manual audit task into something that gets resolved naturally during your normal publishing workflow.

And where the manual audit requires setting a calendar reminder to repeat the process in six months, SureRank’s ongoing analysis means the audit is always current. Every time you publish, every time you update, every time something changes, the on-page panel reflects the current state, not the state of your site six months ago.

Start your site audit with SureRank – free, no credit card required →

The free version covers the on-page and technical audit checks inside WordPress. When you’re ready to add AI-powered fixes and bulk optimisation, Pro starts at $8.25/month for up to 10 sites.

What to Do With Your Findings

Running the audit gives you a list. The list is not the goal. What you do with it is.

Here’s the triage framework:

Fix immediately (hours, not days):

• Any noindex settings on pages you want ranked
• Robots.txt blocking important content
• Redirect loops or chains of three or more hops
• Missing or duplicate title tags on key pages
• 404 errors on pages that had backlinks pointing to them

Fix within this week:

• Core Web Vitals failures on important pages
• Missing meta descriptions on high-impression Search Console pages
• Canonical tag issues causing indexing conflicts
• Pages with zero internal links pointing to them

Work on over the next 30–90 days:

• Content improvements on pages with high impressions but low rankings
• Expanding thin content on posts targeting competitive keywords
• Building internal link clusters around your most valuable cornerstone content
• Beginning backlink acquisition for keywords where the gap is significant

An SEO audit is only useful if it produces action. The sites that use audit findings as a working document, returning to it weekly and moving items from the list to the done column, are the sites that see measurable traffic growth from the exercise.

The ones that produce a report and file it are exactly where they started six months later.

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Audit done? Here’s what to work on next: our guide to why your website isn’t ranking on Google covers the ranking factors behind what your audit surfaces, the complete on-page SEO checklist is your pre-publish quality check, and how to find the right keywords for your WordPress site ensures the content you’re building toward is worth optimizing for in the first place.

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