How To Perform an SEO Audit

From changing search engine results pages (SERPs) to the increasing popularity of AI search tools, SEO is rapidly shifting its shape in 2025.

Conducting an in-depth website audit now will help you get ahead of the curve and:

• Identify technical issues that could keep your site from appearing in SERPs and LLM responses
• Find and grab “quick win” keywords that will improve your site’s overall rank quickly
• Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and accessible to visitors on all devices, which can help to reduce bounce rate
• Develop a reliable SEO strategy (and generative engine optimization, or GEO, strategy) for growth in the face of change

What Happens During an SEO Audit?

During an SEO audit, you’ll take a close look at technical elements and ranking factors like:

• Site structure and code
• Page content quality and organization
• Internal links
• Backlink quality
• Broken links
• Image files
• Metadata
• Page load speeds
• Mobile-friendliness
• User experience

What Tools Do You Need to Perform an SEO Audit?

To perform an SEO audit, you’ll need SEO tools (like Semrush), an analytics tool, and Google Search Console.

I’ve audited hundreds of sites over the years, and while it can be a time-consuming process, the right tools make everything easier.

Essential Tools for SEO Audits

• An SEO tool. You need a good keyword research and SEO tool to conduct an effective SEO audit. I like Semrush, but if you have access to another tool like Ahrefs or SE Ranking, that’ll work too.
• An analytics tool. This is most useful if it’s already up and running before you start your site audit. Google Analytics is the most popular (and free) tool, but platforms like Fathom Analytics can also give you lots of great data.
• Google Search Console (GSC). A GSC account lets you see how your site is appearing in search results, check for indexing issues, submit your sitemap for review, and more.

Tools That Make SEO Audits Even Easier

• A dedicated SEO audit tool. You can conduct SEO audits using Semrush, Ahrefs, and similar platforms. Having a second, dedicated SEO audit tool is extra helpful, though. I use Screaming Frog the most; Sitebulb is another strong option. You can compare Screaming Frog vs Semrush here.
• An AI tool. AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity are optional, but can be helpful for sorting data. (Keep in mind, though, that these tools often use your conversation data to train their AI algorithm further.)

Step 1: Technical SEO Audit

The very first step in any technical audit is to begin scanning your site using a site audit tool. If you're using Semrush, locate the Site Audit tool under the SEO menu and click “create project” to get started.

There are several settings you can configure at this point. I suggest using:

• User agent: SiteAuditBot (Mobile)
• Crawl delay: Minimum
• JS rendering: On
• Do not bypass disallow rules in robots.txt and meta robots tag

I like to begin on some other tasks while the audit is running.

Check the XML Sitemap and Robots.txt

A sitemap is a directory that tells search engines and other crawlers (including the ones used by tools like Semrush) how your webpages are organized.

The robots.txt file then tells crawlers which pages on your site to view and which to ignore.

If your sitemap and robots.txt files are configured incorrectly, you can either reveal or block too much of your site from appearing in search results.

What to Do:

• Check to make sure you have a robots.txt file by adding /robots.txt to the end of your homepage URL
• Make sure there’s a link to your sitemap at the top of the robots.txt file (it typically looks like your URL followed by /sitemap.xml).
• Visit the sitemap and make sure it’s accessible
• Open your Semrush Site Audit report, when ready, and click on “Errors, Warnings, and Notices.” Look for any errors or warnings related to the sitemap and robots.txt file.

Review Site Indexability and Crawlability

Once you’ve confirmed your sitemap is configured correctly, it’s time to make sure that your site is indexed by search engines.

What to Do:

• Click on Crawlability in your Semrush Site Audit overview.
• Look at the ratio of crawlable to non-crawlable pages. A high ratio of non-crawlable pages indicates you may have an issue, and search engines can’t access your full site.
• Next, open Google Search Console and click on “sitemaps.” If your sitemap is listed and the status says "success," you're good to go.
• If your sitemap isn’t listed or it has a different status message, enter the URL for your sitemap and click “submit" to tell Google to index your site.

Review and Fix Crawl Budget Issues

Crawlers, including those used by Google, don’t run on an endless basis. A fixed amount of time or number of pages gets devoted to crawls, and once your website uses up its budget, the crawler moves onto another site.

What to Do:

• Return to the Semrush crawlability report and look at the Crawl Budget Waste chart.
• Take a close look at redirects, duplicate content, canonical tags, and 4xx / 5xx errors. Some redirects, canonicals pointing to a different page, and 4xx errors are normal. High numbers of any, though, indicate you may have an issue with how pages are loading or appearing in your sitemap.

Assess Site Speed and Mobile Responsiveness

Fun fact: Google bases indexing and ranking on a website’s mobile version. This is true whether most of your customers use their phones or not.

Because of this, it’s important to make sure that your site loads quickly and looks good on mobile devices. (This is why I recommend using the mobile crawl agent to run your audits in Semrush.)

What to Do:

• From your site audit report dashboard, click on Core Web Vitals.
• Check the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score, Total Blocking Time (TBT) metrics, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) results.
• Evaluate your ratio of “good” to “improve” or “poor” results.
• If you see a lot of "poor" results, take a closer look at your pages to see if there are issues with mobile-responsive design, images that can be compressed, or excessive unused plugins attached to your site.

Step 2: On Page SEO Audit

It’s important to resolve technical SEO issues first so that the structure of your site doesn’t negatively impact the rest of your SEO efforts.

Once you’ve completed the technical audit, though, it’s time to move to an on-page SEO audit. This is where we’ll check keywords, schema, and other important parts of your website’s performance.

Review Keyword Use

You should already have specific keywords that you want to target using different pages on your site. (If not, that’s OK—you’ll work on building out a keyword list in the next stage of the audit process.)

What to Do:

• Open the Domain Overview tool and type in your website URL.
• Look at the topics associated with your site—are these in line with what you expect? Are there any incorrect topics, or important terms that are missing? If so, it indicates that you may need to focus on better keyword use across your website’s main pages.
• Select a sample array of landing pages on your site. Check to see if your primary keywords appear in the page URL slug, meta title, meta description, and H1 title tags.
• Run a Semrush Keyword Overview report on each page’s primary keyword to get keyword variations that you can add into the text to further enhance its optimization.

Analyze Relevance and E-E-A-T

Keywords aren’t the only factor in ensuring a page ranks well and gets associated with the right topics. It’s also important to achieve information gain and show good E-E-A-T.

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a measure of the quality and trust signals in your content.

What to Do:

• Gather a selection of landing and blog pages to evaluate.
• Look at the author for each bylined page. Do they, and their content, meet E-E-A-T metrics?
• Look at your pages without a named author. Select a primary keyword for each page and generate a Keyword Overview report.
• Add your domain to the Keyword Overview reports to see if you have topical authority for a given term. If not, you may need to either change your topics or build up greater authority through more targeted on- and off-page SEO work.

Check Meta Title and Description

Your meta title and description are what appear in standard search results. Both elements should include your primary page keyword. (Sometimes Google will replace your chosen meta description with different text, and that’s OK.)

What to Do:

• Open up the Errors, Warnings, and Notices section in your Site Audit report.
• Scan for any related issues, such as missing or duplicate meta tags, then make the suggested edits.

Check Headers

Page titles should have the H1 tag; any headers after that can be H2, H3, or H4. Proper use of title tags can help you appear in more SERP features like the AI Overview and People Also Ask.

What to Do:

• Review the errors and warnings for any header issues. Semrush will flag any pages missing an H1. You can also see any pages that have duplicate H1s.
• Update these pages’ headers as soon as possible.

Review Image Optimization

Images are an important part of SEO, too. Good images can give you new ways to appear in the SERP … and bad, large, or corrupt image files can negatively impact site performance.

What to Do:

• Using the Errors, Warnings, and Notices report (also called Issues) look for broken image links to fix.
• Next, look for missing ALT attributes. Add an ALT attribute to any image that doesn’t have one at present.
• Go back to your Core Web Vitals report and look at the details for any pages that had a poor LCP or TBT score.

Analyze Schema Markup

Schema markup, or structured data, is code that signals certain information to search engines. For example, there’s structured data you can use to pass on details about an author, products for sale, restaurant popularity, and more.

Proper schema markup can also lead to more rich snippets appearing in search results, which encourages searchers to click on your site. You can look for schema issues in your Site Audit report.

What to Do:

• Open your Site Audit report and click on Crawled Pages.
• Click on Advanced Filters and select Structured Data Items.
• Choose a type of structured data you know or think you should have on your site (for example, if I have a large blog, I’ll click “article.”)
• Click on a page that appears in the list of results, then click on the markup structured data suggestions for that URL. This will show you what types of structured data you have on your site and whether it’s valid.

Step 3: SEO Content Audit

Now it’s time to take a closer look at the actual content of our pages, not just the headers and overall structure.

Check Keyword Positions

First, you’ll want to establish a baseline for where your site stands in SERPs today.

What to Do:

• Run a Domain Overview report.
• Look at the Organic Keywords chart to evaluate your search ranking position.
• Next, look at the SERP Features section. This shows you how many times you appear in sections like the featured snippet, AI Overview, image pack, and more.
• Finally, check how much of your organic traffic comes from branded searches, as these searchers already know about your company when they start Googling.

Based on what you see here, set some goals for your SEO progress. This could look like:

• Improving the number of keywords ranking in spots one through 10.
• Capturing more SERP features.
• Shifting 10% of your traffic distribution from branded to non-branded searches.

Your goals will help to inform the rest of the actions you take while working on on-page optimization.

Identify Content Decay

Creating new content is an important part of on-page SEO work, but you’ll also want to allocate time for improving older content.

What to Do:

• Run an On-Page SEO Checker report in Semrush.
• Sort the results in the update column from oldest to newest content.
• Review the suggested updates, paying particular attention to the SERP Feature, Content, and Semantic
• Create an SEO Writing Assistant report for the terms you’d like to focus on when updating these pages. The assistant will give you additional semantic keyword suggestions and real-time SEO feedback as you write.

Find Low-Quality and Thin Content

Having a bunch of pages on your site is only beneficial if they contain high-quality content. You can look for thin content (pages that should have more valuable text) and hard-to-read or low-quality content with two tools.

What to Do:

• Download Screaming Frog (free, with limits) and scan your website or blog.
• Click on the Content tab and sort by word count and readability.
• Look for pages, like blogs, that have a low word count. Consider expanding the content on these pages during your next site update.
• Get a closer look at page content quality by scanning selected URLs with the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant.
• Create a content brief to update your thin content with new keywords and links using the SEO Content Template tool.

Find SERP Feature Opportunities

Finding ways to optimize your up-to-date pages for SERP features can be another source of quick wins. The On-Page SEO Checker gives you some suggestions for SERP features to target, but you can also find opportunities manually.

What to Do:

• Run a Domain Overview report
• Click on Top Organic Keywords
• Click on the SERP Features drop down
• Scroll to “Domain doesn’t rank” and select one or more SERP features (such as AI Overview) to see keywords for which you appear in the results, but don’t hold a feature position.

Find AI and LLM Opportunities

More people are turning to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to find answers to questions.

That’s why it’s becoming increasingly important to optimize for AI search.

The Semrush SERP Features filter lets you find keywords that generate an AI overview. But you can also find keywords that are ideal for use when you want your site to appear in ChatGPT-style answers.

The trick is to look for long-tail target keywords and questions that people might be likely to type into a chat. I find the Topic Research tool helpful.

What to Do:

• Open the Topic Research tool and type in a keyword
• Explore the results in various formats, focusing on “how” or “why” phrases that may trigger a longer, conversational result in an LLM tool

Step 4: Off-Page SEO (Backlink) Audit

Up to this point, we’ve focused on elements of our site that we can control. But what other sites do when they reference our domain is also important.

Analyze Backlinks

Getting backlinks from high-quality sites can help to improve your site’s performance in search results; too many links from low-quality sites may have the inverse effect. You can get the lay of the land quickly by analyzing your backlink profile.

What to Do:

• Run a Backlink Audit report for your website.
• Check the Overall Toxicity Score. If this is high, or your total number of referring domains is low, scroll down to the Backlinks to Review section
• Filter the list to show the most toxic domains.
• Click the “no” symbol next to toxic domains whose backlinks you’d like Google to ignore.
• When finished, move to the Disavow tab and export them in a text file that you can upload to the Google Disavow Tool.
• You can also add these links to the Remove list by selecting the mail icon next to each toxic link source. Semrush will automatically populate the site owner’s contact information so you can request they stop linking to your domain. Plan to send these requests as part of your next link building campaign.

Keep Improving Your SEO with Semrush and Exploding Topics

There’s another reason Semrush is my SEO audit tool of choice: it gives me access to Exploding Topics. Being able to see what trends are about to take off is incredibly useful information to have on hand when building out my and my clients’ SEO content calendars. It’s information that keeps us one step ahead of competitors.

Give this duo a try to see exactly how handy it is for improving your SEO—get a free one-week trial of Exploding Topics Pro, then add an extended 14-day Semrush trial with our exclusive coupon code.