Generate your Website SEO Report

How to run an audit

Audit templates, not random URLs. Most sites are built from a handful of page types: the homepage, category or service pages, product or location pages, and articles. A problem in a template repeats on every page that uses it, so auditing one representative URL per template finds most site-wide issues quickly.

Enter the full URL exactly as you want it indexed, including https and the preferred www or non-www host. If the audit shows a redirect or a canonical pointing somewhere else, that is your first finding: you may be auditing a page that search engines do not treat as the primary version.

Pick pages with evidence

If you have Google Search Console, start there. Pages that lost impressions recently, pages with high impressions but a low click rate, and pages marked "Crawled, currently not indexed" in the Page indexing report are the ones where an audit is most likely to explain a real problem. A page that already ranks well and converts is a lower priority, however many yellow items it carries.

For a competitor comparison, audit their equivalent template with the same settings. Differences in title length, heading coverage, schema types and answer formatting often explain a gap faster than any backlink report.

Before you change anything, save or share the report. A baseline lets you prove what improved and spot regressions when a developer later deploys an unrelated change that breaks a tag.

The order to fix things

Fix issues in order of how much traffic they can block, not how many there are. A report with forty yellow items and one red noindex has one urgent problem.

1. Crawl and index blockers: noindex tags, X-Robots-Tag headers, robots.txt disallows, wrong canonicals and non-200 status codes.
2. Discovery: XML sitemap coverage, internal links to the page and broken links.
3. Relevance: title, H1, headings and content that match the search intent.
4. Experience: speed, mobile rendering and security headers.
5. Enhancements: schema, social tags, FAQ content and AI-oriented formatting.

The priority list in the report already follows this logic. Where two items carry similar weight, pick the cheaper one first; quick wins build the momentum that gets larger tickets approved.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO decides whether a search engine can fetch, render and index the page at all. Everything else in the audit assumes these checks pass.

Indexing controls

There are three places a page can be excluded: the robots meta tag in the HTML, the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, and robots.txt. They behave differently. Robots.txt stops crawling, but a blocked URL can still appear in results without a snippet if other pages link to it. A noindex removes the page from the index, but only if crawlers are allowed to fetch the page and see the directive. Never combine a robots.txt disallow with a noindex you want honored.

Canonicals and duplicates

A canonical tag is a strong hint about the preferred URL for duplicate or near-duplicate content. Self-referencing canonicals on unique pages are good practice. The common failure is a template that points every page's canonical at the homepage or at a staging domain, which the audit flags in red.

Performance and Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals now consist of Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. INP replaced First Input Delay in March 2024, so guidance that still mentions FID is out of date. Good thresholds at the 75th percentile are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 milliseconds and CLS of 0.1 or less. Server response time, HTML size and compression, which the audit measures on every run, are the foundation under all three.

Security headers

HTTPS is a confirmed lightweight ranking signal. Headers like HSTS, Content-Security-Policy and X-Frame-Options are not ranking factors, but they protect users from downgrade attacks, script injection and clickjacking, and a hacked site loses rankings far faster than a slow one.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO tells search engines what the page is about and persuades searchers to click. The audit reports the raw facts; the judgment about intent is yours.

Titles and descriptions

Google truncates titles by pixel width, so the character count in the report is a guide rather than a hard limit. Put the primary topic near the start, make each title unique across the site, and write the meta description as a reason to click. Google rewrites descriptions it finds unhelpful, which is a signal to make yours more specific, not to skip them.

Headings and content

Use one H1 that states the topic and H2s that cover the subtopics a searcher expects. Compare the top keywords the audit extracts with the query you are targeting. If the most frequent terms are navigation labels or boilerplate, the page has too little unique text.

Links and images

Internal links spread authority and help crawlers find deeper pages; descriptive anchor text helps them understand the target. Fix broken links from the sample, and write alt text that describes the image in context rather than repeating a keyword.

Schema and social tags

Structured data describes the page in a vocabulary machines read without guessing. The audit detects the JSON-LD, microdata or RDFa already present and suggests types that fit, such as Organization and WebSite on the homepage, Article on posts, Product with offers on product pages, and LocalBusiness for a physical location.

Three rules keep schema useful. Mark up only what is visible on the page, because markup that describes hidden or invented content violates Google's guidelines and can earn a manual action. Keep values consistent with the page and with your other profiles, especially name, address and phone for local businesses. And validate changes with Google's Rich Results Test, since a single syntax error can void the whole block.

OpenGraph and Twitter card tags do not affect rankings, but they control the title, description and image shown when someone shares the URL in social apps and messaging tools. A missing og:image often means a blank or random preview, which lowers click rates on every share.

AEO: answer engine optimization

AEO is the practice of formatting content so that search features and assistants can extract a direct answer from it. It overlaps heavily with featured snippet optimization, and the same habits help with AI Overviews and voice results.

The audit checks three things. First, question-style headings that mirror real queries. Second, a direct answer paragraph under each question, ideally 40 to 60 words, that stands on its own. Third, an FAQ block for secondary questions. Keep in mind that Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites in 2023, so FAQ content now earns its keep by answering questions, not by winning a special snippet.

GEO: generative engine optimization

GEO focuses on being retrieved and cited by generative engines such as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. It starts with access: if robots.txt disallows the relevant AI agents, the rest is moot. The audit checks AI bot access and whether an llms.txt file exists. Treat llms.txt as optional, since it is a proposal rather than a standard that AI providers have committed to.

Beyond access, generative engines favor content they can attribute confidently. The audit looks for citations and statistics in your text because specific, sourced figures are easier to quote than general claims. Add numbers only when you can source them, link to the original data, and attach dates so readers and models know how current the figure is.

For a deeper look at the AI side, the AI SEO score checker breaks visibility into five groups, and the AI Citation Analyzer shows which domains AI engines actually cite for your topic.

Turning findings into fixes

Audits fail when findings stay in a PDF. Convert each red and yellow item into a ticket that names the template affected, the current value, the expected value and how to verify the fix. "Canonical on /product/* points to /; should self-reference; verify by rerunning the audit on any product URL" gets done. "Fix canonicals" does not.

Group tickets by owner. Server headers, compression and response time belong to whoever manages hosting or the CDN. Templates, headings and schema belong to developers. Titles, descriptions, answer paragraphs and FAQ content belong to writers or editors. Sending each person only their items, with the share link as evidence, removes most of the back and forth.

Finally, verify in two stages. Rerun the audit as soon as a fix is deployed to confirm the page now passes. Then use Google Search Console's URL Inspection tool to request recrawling of important pages and check that Google sees the same canonical and indexing status you do.

How often to re-audit

Re-audit on events, and on a schedule as a safety net. The events that break SEO are predictable: theme or template updates, CMS and plugin upgrades, CDN or hosting changes, site migrations, and new page types going live. Run an audit on affected templates the same day.

As a schedule, monthly checks of your key templates suit most sites, and weekly checks make sense for large ecommerce or news sites where templates change often. After fixing issues, wait until search engines have recrawled the page before judging the traffic effect; the audit confirms the fix immediately, but rankings take longer to respond.