Traffic has been falling for three months and nobody on the team can say why. Analytics shows the decline, Search Console stays quiet, and the agency that built the site two years ago no longer answers the phone. At this point most companies make one of two mistakes: they start paying for links, or they decide they need a new website.
Both are expensive ways of not solving the problem. The right move is an SEO audit: a systematic review of everything that affects how a site performs in search, sorted by how much each problem actually costs you.
What an SEO audit is, and what it is not
An SEO audit is a diagnosis. The goal is to establish why a site performs the way it does in organic search and what exactly needs to change. The output is a list of specific problems, an explanation of what causes each one, and a priority order for fixing them.
What it is not: a 300 page report of automatically generated warnings from a crawler. It is also not a keyword list. If someone sent you a PDF with 4000 rows of "issues", that is raw material, not an audit. The value lies in reading that data and separating what matters from what does not.
When an audit pays off
There are a few moments when an SEO audit returns its cost quickly:
A traffic drop with no obvious cause. The most common trigger. It might be an algorithm update, a technical change on the site, or a competitor who published something better.
Before a redesign or migration. An audit before migration saves far more than it costs. You know which pages bring traffic, which URLs must be redirected and what should not be touched.
After a migration, when something has broken. Forgotten redirects, lost meta tags, a noindex left over from the staging environment.
A new site that never took off. Published six months ago, content is there, but pages do not rank. The problem is usually technical or structural.
A yearly check. For sites that depend seriously on organic traffic, this is maintenance, not a luxury.
Technical SEO audit: the foundation
If Google cannot reach, render and index your pages, nothing else matters. So the technical part goes first.
Indexing and crawling
Start with Google Search Console, the Page indexing report. It shows how many pages are indexed, how many are excluded and the reason for each exclusion.
Look for:
- Pages marked "Discovered, currently not indexed". Google knows about them but has not crawled them. Often a signal of weak internal linking or thin content.
- "Crawled, currently not indexed". A worse sign: Google saw the content and decided not to include it. Usually duplicate or thin pages.
- Pages blocked by robots.txt that should not be blocked.
- noindex tags left in place by mistake.
- Canonical tags pointing to the wrong addresses.
Open your robots.txt and read it line by line. I have seen shops block their entire category structure because of one rule added during development.
URL structure and duplicates
The same product available at five different addresses is a classic e-commerce problem. Filters, sorting, session parameters, versions with and without a trailing slash, http and https, with and without www.
Each version splits the signals across several addresses instead of concentrating them on one. The fix is a combination of canonical tags, 301 redirects and parameter rules.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Speed is not the main ranking factor, but it is a factor, and it directly affects conversion. Measure with field data from Search Console, not only with one off lab tests.
The three metrics Google tracks:
| Metric | What it measures | Good value |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | Time until the largest visible element loads | under 2.5 seconds |
| INP | Delay when the user interacts with the page | under 200 milliseconds |
| CLS | Visual shifting of elements during load | under 0.1 |
The most common causes of poor scores: unoptimised images (a 3 MB JPG instead of a 120 KB WebP), too many WordPress plugins, weak hosting, and advertising scripts that block rendering. There is more on this in the guide to PageSpeed Insights and site speed.
The mobile version
Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. If the mobile version has less content, hidden sections or different internal links, that directly affects rankings. Check that text, headings and structured data all exist in the mobile view too.
HTTPS, certificates and mixed content
An expired or misconfigured certificate breaks both trust and accessibility. Also check for mixed content, meaning resources loaded over http on an https page.
Auditing the content
Once the technical side is clean, the more interesting part begins. This is where most sites have the largest untapped potential.
Page inventory
Build a list of every indexed page and record against each one: traffic over the last 12 months, number of keywords it ranks for, conversions, date of last edit.
Four groups usually emerge:
Pages that work. They bring traffic and conversions. Do not touch them without reason, but check whether they can be expanded.
Borderline pages. They rank in positions 8 to 20 for keywords with real volume. This is the quickest win: a modest rewrite often pushes them into the top 5.
Pages with no traffic. Published, indexed, but nobody finds them. Here you decide whether to rewrite, merge or remove.
Cannibalising pages. Two or three pages compete for the same query. Google does not know which to show, so none of them rank well. Merge them into one strong page and redirect the rest.
Search intent match
The most underrated check of all. Open Google in incognito mode, search your target keyword and look at what the engine actually shows on page one. If the results are comparison tables and your page is promotional copy about your service, you will not rank, no matter how well the copy is written.
The match between what the user is looking for and what the page offers is the first condition. Everything else comes after it.
Titles, meta descriptions and structure
Check for duplicate title tags, titles over 60 characters that get truncated, missing or auto generated meta descriptions, pages with more than one H1, and missing heading hierarchy.
These are small fixes, but across a 200 page site the cumulative effect is noticeable. If you write the copy yourself, see the guide to website copywriting.
Structured data
Schema markup does not raise rankings directly, but it changes how the result looks and how many people click it. For shops, Product and Review schemas give stars and price in the results. For services, LocalBusiness and FAQ schemas take up more space. Details are in the article on structured data and schema markup.
Internal links and architecture
Internal linking is the part almost everyone skips, even though it is entirely under your control and costs nothing but time.
Click depth
Every important page should be reachable within three clicks of the homepage. If a product category sits five levels deep, Google crawls it rarely and gives it less weight.
Orphans and dead ends
Orphan pages have no internal links pointing at them. They exist in the sitemap but are not part of the structure. A crawler like Screaming Frog finds them in minutes.
Dead ends are pages with no outgoing links. The user arrives and has nowhere to go next.
Anchor text
"Click here" carries no information. "Guide to building an online store" does. Use descriptive anchors that say what is on the other side of the link.
Backlinks and authority
The link profile is checked on two levels: quantity and quality.
Look at where the links come from. Topically relevant sites with real traffic are worth more than hundreds of links from directories built only to host links. If the profile shows traces of bought links from questionable networks, that is a risk, not an asset.
Compare yourself with competitors: which domains link to them but not to you. This is the most practical source of ideas for link building.
Prioritisation: what comes first
An audit finds 40 problems. There is no point in fixing them in the order they were discovered. Sort them along two axes: impact on traffic and effort to fix.
| Priority | Type of problem | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Immediate | Blocks indexing or breaks pages | noindex on key pages, broken redirects, 5xx errors |
| High | Large impact, moderate effort | cannibalisation, missing title tags, pages at positions 8 to 15 |
| Medium | Visible impact, heavier work | restructuring categories, speed optimisation |
| Low | Small impact or large effort | schema on secondary pages, cosmetic improvements |
One rule from practice: first fix what is getting in the way, then add something new. There is no point publishing 20 new articles on a site Google cannot crawl properly.
Tools for an SEO audit
Free: Google Search Console (irreplaceable, it gives real data from Google), Google Analytics 4, PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog in its free tier up to 500 URLs, and the Rich Results Test for structured data.
Paid: Ahrefs, Semrush or Sitebulb. They provide the backlink profile, competitor positions and deeper technical diagnostics. Market subscriptions start at roughly 100 euro per month, which is worth it only if you work on SEO continuously rather than once.
Tools, though, are just measuring instruments. They show symptoms. The diagnosis and the fix come from the person reading the data.
How long it takes and what it costs
Duration depends on the size of the site. A 15 page brochure site can be audited in a day. An online store with 5000 products, filters and several language versions needs a week or more for the technical part alone.
On price: there is a wide gap between an automatically generated report and a real audit done by a person. Automated reports are almost free and worth exactly that. A serious audit takes days of work and is priced according to scope.
Our pricing is individual and depends on page count, platform and whether you want analysis only or analysis plus implementation of the fixes. We send a quote within 24 hours of seeing the site. If you already know you want the optimisation work too, see the page on SEO and GEO services.
Frequently asked questions
How often should an SEO audit be done?
For most business websites once a year is enough, plus a quick check after any significant change to the site. Online stores with active catalogues and frequent changes benefit from quarterly technical reviews. If traffic drops, the audit happens immediately rather than waiting for the next scheduled one.
Can I run an SEO audit myself?
The technical foundation is entirely accessible. Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and the free tier of Screaming Frog cover a large share of the checks and need no special skills. Harder to do alone are the search intent analysis, spotting cannibalisation and benchmarking against competitors, because those require experience in interpretation rather than just data.
How long until the fixes show results?
It depends on what was fixed. Technical indexing problems take effect within a week or two after recrawling. Content improvements usually show in 4 to 8 weeks. Architecture and internal linking changes take 2 to 3 months to register. If someone promises results in seven days, ask them exactly what they plan to do.
Does an SEO audit include the fixes?
Not automatically. The audit is a diagnosis and a prioritised task list. Implementation is separate work and is agreed separately. Some clients take the audit and hand it to their in house team, others commission the implementation as well. Both are normal.
What is the difference between an SEO audit and competitor analysis?
An audit looks inward: what in your site works and what gets in the way. Competitor analysis looks outward: what others are doing, which keywords they rank for and where their links come from. The two complement each other and in a serious project run together, but their focus differs. More on the second part in the article on online competitor analysis.
What to do next
If your traffic is falling or the site simply does not rank, do not start with new articles and do not think about a new website. First find out where the problem is.
The minimum you can do today: open Google Search Console, look at the indexing report and compare clicks for the last three months against the three before. If you see something you do not understand, there is something worth checking more deeply.
WEBPROGRESS runs full SEO audits for websites and online stores, with a prioritised plan and a clear timeline for every fix. Get in touch with your site address and you will have a quote within 24 hours.
