How to conduct an seo audit: A concise, actionable guide

Running a proper SEO audit means methodically checking your website’s technical setup, content, and authority to find what's holding back your search performance. The whole process is strategic, starting with a deep technical crawl, moving into content evaluation, and ending with a practical, actionable roadmap for real growth.

Why a Modern SEO Audit Is Your Strategic Roadmap

By 2026, a genuine SEO audit is far more than just a quick scan for errors. It’s a strategic roadmap that reveals why your site is underperforming and gives you the exact steps to fix it. Think of it less like a simple checklist and more like a business intelligence exercise for your organic channel—one that can turn a struggling website into a dependable source of revenue.

The old distinctions between technical health, content quality, and user experience have all but disappeared. A truly effective audit has to look at how all these elements work together. It's no longer about just fixing a few broken links or stuffing in some keywords; today’s audit is a full diagnosis of your entire digital ecosystem.

The mark of a successful audit is a clear, prioritised plan. It’s not about finding every single tiny error. It’s about pinpointing the critical few issues that will unlock the biggest gains in traffic and conversions.

The Core Pillars of a Successful Audit

A thorough approach to an audit breaks down the findings into four main pillars. This structure helps you turn a jumble of issues into a coherent strategy that actually makes sense.

• Technical SEO: This is the bedrock of your site. It covers everything from site speed and mobile-friendliness to whether search engines can even crawl and index your pages. If Google can't find and understand your site efficiently, even the most brilliant content will go unseen.
• On-Page SEO: This looks at the quality and relevance of your content. You’ll be analysing page titles, how well a page meets user intent, and whether it demonstrates genuine expertise and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
• Off-Page SEO: This is all about your website's authority and reputation online. Here, the focus is on dissecting your backlink profile to gauge its quality and root out any toxic links that might be dragging you down.
• User Experience (UX): It’s crucial to understand how people actually interact with your site. This part of the audit checks for intuitive navigation, clear calls-to-action, and a smooth path from the moment someone lands on your site to when they convert.

The need for these in-depth audits has become more urgent, especially after recent search engine shake-ups. In the UK, for instance, Google's string of major algorithm updates from 2024 to early 2026 completely changed the ranking game. The March 2024 Core and Spam Updates rolled the Helpful Content System directly into the main ranking algorithm, causing some businesses to lose up to 97% of their visibility almost instantly. You can explore more on the evolution of the website audit and see why this process is now a must for survival and growth.

Right, let's get into the nitty-gritty of how a proper SEO audit actually begins. It's not about firing up your favourite tool and hitting "crawl." That's a recipe for a data headache. The real work starts with a simple, yet crucial, question: Why are we even doing this?

Diving into an SEO audit without a clear goal is like setting sail without a map. You'll gather a mountain of data, sure, but you'll have no idea which bits actually matter. Before you even think about crawling a single URL, you need to define what a "win" looks like for the business.

Are you trying to claw back organic traffic after a mysterious drop? Maybe the goal is to boost conversions for a key product line by 15% in the next two quarters. Or perhaps a new competitor has burst onto the scene, and your mission is to defend your turf and reclaim rankings for your most valuable keywords.

These specific, measurable goals are the foundation of your entire audit. They focus your analysis on the metrics that directly impact the bottom line and help you separate minor tweaks from major growth blockers.

A great audit doesn't just find problems; it finds the right problems. Your goals determine which data points are noise and which are signals pointing directly to revenue growth.

Defining Your Audit Objectives

Resist the temptation to aim for vague targets like "more traffic." Instead, tie your objectives to real business outcomes. For an e-commerce brand, a powerful objective sounds something like this: "Increase organic revenue from our 'women's trainers' category by 25% over the next two quarters."

See how specific that is? It immediately gives your audit a laser focus. You now know you need to scrutinise the technical health, content quality, and backlink profile of that specific category and its product pages.

Assembling Your Core Audit Toolkit

Once you know your destination, it's time to pack your bag. While there are countless SEO tools out there, any comprehensive audit relies on a handful of core platforms, each playing a specialist role.

This whole process can be visualised as a cycle, not just a straight line. It's a flow between the technical groundwork, the content you build on top, the authority you earn, and the experience you provide to users.

As the diagram shows, a successful audit isn't a simple checklist. It's about understanding how technical health underpins content performance, which is then amplified by off-page authority and ultimately validated by a positive user experience.

To tackle this, you'll need a few essentials in your digital toolbox.

Essential SEO Audit Toolkit

For any serious audit, you need a combination of tools to get a full picture of the website's health and its position in the market. Here’s a breakdown of the non-negotiables I use every time.

Tool Category	Example Tools	Primary Function
Website Crawlers	Screaming Frog, Sitebulb	Mimics search engine bots to find on-site technical issues like broken links, redirect chains, and duplicate content at scale.
All-in-One SEO Platforms	Ahrefs, Semrush	Provides a 360-degree view of your market, including backlink analysis, competitor research, and keyword rank tracking.
Google's Data Sources	Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4	Offers direct-from-the-source insights on indexing, Core Web Vitals, and how users find and interact with your site.

Each of these tool types gives you a different piece of the puzzle. The crawler tells you what’s technically broken on your site. The all-in-one platform shows you where you sit in the competitive landscape. And Google's own tools reveal how search engines and actual users are perceiving and interacting with your pages.

Using them together is what separates a surface-level check from a deep, meaningful audit that drives real change.

Mastering Your Technical Audit from Crawling to Core Web Vitals

With your goals mapped out and tools at the ready, it's time to get your hands dirty and investigate your website's technical foundations. We always start with a technical SEO audit because, frankly, if search engines can’t find, crawl, and make sense of your pages, even the most incredible content will just be shouting into the void.

Think of it as checking the foundations of a house before you start decorating. You need to know everything is structurally sound. I kick this off by running a full site crawl using a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. This crawl essentially mimics how a search engine bot explores your site, revealing a mountain of data that points to all the hidden gremlins.

That initial crawl gives you a complete inventory of every single URL, from your best-selling product pages to old blog posts you probably forgot you even wrote. Now, the real analysis begins.

Uncovering Crawlability and Indexing Blockers

First things first: we need to make sure there are no major roadblocks preventing Google from accessing your content. It's astonishing how often simple misconfigurations can render entire sections of a site invisible, completely kneecapping organic performance from day one.

Your starting point is the robots.txt file. This tiny text file holds immense power; it tells search engine crawlers which parts of your site they can and cannot visit. A single incorrect Disallow rule, often a remnant from a site migration or development phase, can accidentally block crucial category pages or—in a worst-case scenario—your entire site from being indexed.

From there, you'll turn your attention to the XML sitemap. This file is your site’s roadmap for search engines, listing all the important URLs you want them to find. A clean, accurate sitemap is non-negotiable. Look for common problems like:

• Broken URLs: Pages that return a 404 error but are still listed in your sitemap waste precious crawl budget.
• Non-Canonical Pages: Including URLs that point to another 'master' version just confuses search engines.
• Redirecting URLs: Your sitemap should only ever contain the final destination URLs, not links that redirect elsewhere.

A structured approach is vital for a complete SEO audit in the UK. Research from 2025 highlighted common technical blockers, finding that 23% of sites fail to link their XML sitemap in their robots.txt file, 17% have redirecting URLs in their sitemaps, and 15% are missing a sitemap entirely. These small errors really do add up.

Diagnosing Site Speed and Core Web Vitals

A slow website is a conversion killer. In e-commerce, every millisecond genuinely counts. This is where Core Web Vitals (CWVs) come in—a set of specific metrics Google uses to measure real-world user experience. Recent data shows that just over half of websites (54.6%) pass all three Core Web Vitals, which presents a huge opportunity to gain a competitive edge if you can get it right.

Core Web Vitals aren't just technical jargon; they are a direct measure of user frustration. A poor score often means users are leaving before your page even loads, costing you sales.

Let’s quickly demystify these key metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how quickly your page loads. Specifically, it's the time it takes for the largest image or text block to become visible. On an e-commerce site, this is usually the main product image or hero banner.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): This measures responsiveness. It tracks the lag between a user’s action (like clicking a button) and the browser's visual response. A high INP makes your site feel sluggish and broken.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures visual stability. It quantifies how much a page’s content unexpectedly jumps around while loading. We've all experienced it—those annoying pop-ups or ads that push content down just as you’re about to click.

To improve these scores, you need to focus on practical fixes. Large, uncompressed images are a classic cause of poor LCP. For INP, it's often bloated JavaScript from third-party apps blocking the main thread. And for CLS, it’s usually images without defined dimensions or ads being injected dynamically. Tackling these is one of the most direct ways to improve website loading speed and boost conversions.

Finally, your technical audit should hunt for other classic performance-killers. I'm talking about broken internal links (404 errors) that lead users and crawlers to dead ends, and long redirect chains that add unnecessary delays. By systematically finding and fixing these foundational issues, you create a stable, efficient base to build the rest of your SEO strategy upon.

Checking Your On-Page Content for User Intent and E-E-A-T

Once your site’s technical foundations are solid, it's time to shift your attention from what machines read to what people experience. This is where you audit what your users—and by extension, Google—actually see: your content. A proper on-page audit today goes so much further than just checking for keywords. It’s about getting to the heart of whether your pages genuinely solve your audience's problems.

The audit starts where the user's journey does: the search results. Your page titles and meta descriptions are your first, and sometimes only, chance to earn a click. Are they just stuffed with keywords, or do they make a compelling promise? Every title needs to be crafted for real people, promising a clear answer to their query.

Getting to the Core of User Intent and Content Quality

Truly understanding user intent means looking beyond the words they type and asking what they really want. For an ecommerce site, someone searching for "best running trainers for flat feet" isn't just browsing. They're on a mission to find a specific product that solves a personal, often painful, problem. Your content has to meet them right at that moment of need.

To break this down systematically, you’ll want to pull your performance data. Head over to Google Search Console and find your top organic landing pages. For each one, put yourself in the user's shoes and ask a few critical questions:

• Does this content completely answer the query? A page targeting "waterproof hiking boots" should be more than a product list. It needs to compare materials, discuss breathability, and maybe even show different brands in action.
• Is the format right for the job? A query like "how to clean suede boots" is crying out for a step-by-step guide, ideally with a video. In contrast, "men's boots sale" demands a clean, easy-to-filter product grid.
• Are there any red flags like thin or duplicate content? Be on the lookout for multiple product pages with almost identical descriptions or category pages with no unique, helpful copy. These are classic quality issues that can absolutely hold a site back.

For a great practical look at how search queries reveal user intent, check out this Amazon Sellers Guide to Search Query Performance. Although it's platform-specific, the core principles of matching what you offer to what people are searching for are universal.

Going through this process will quickly highlight content gaps that are ripe with opportunity. If your competitors are ranking for valuable informational keywords that lead to a sale, that's your cue. You can build a better, more helpful resource that guides people from discovery right through to purchase.

Proving Your Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust

Google’s focus on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) isn't just another buzzword; it’s a clear directive to reward content that is genuinely helpful and created by credible sources. This is non-negotiable for any topic that touches on someone’s health, happiness, or wallet (what Google calls Your Money or Your Life—YMYL).

Your on-page audit needs to include some detective work to find tangible proof of E-E-A-T across your most important pages.

E-E-A-T isn’t a single ranking factor you can optimise for. It’s a framework Google uses to evaluate quality. Your job is to show both users and search engines that you know your stuff and that your advice is sound.

For an ecommerce website, this means looking for practical signals, not just writing good copy. Here are a few things I always check for:

• Experience: Do your product reviews feature real users with photos or videos? Does your blog content show first-hand use, like a post titled, "We Tested 5 Backpacks on a Weekend Hike"?
• Expertise: Are your product guides written or vetted by someone with real credentials? For example, a guide to skincare products gains immense credibility if it's reviewed by a qualified dermatologist. Clear author bylines and bios are crucial here.
• Authoritativeness: Does your brand get mentioned on other reputable websites in your industry? Do you have transparent and detailed "About Us" and "Contact" pages that show you're a real business?
• Trust: Are your shipping and returns policies easy to find and understand? Are customer reviews—both good and bad—visible and authentic? Is your checkout process obviously secure?

Ultimately, a thorough content and on-page audit ensures every page on your site has a clear purpose. It validates that you're working hard to meet user needs, which is the best way to show Google why you deserve to rank. For more specific ideas on putting these principles into action, you might want to look at our deep dive into https://grumspot.com/blog/ecommerce-seo-best-practices.

6. Analysing Backlinks and Your Internal Linking Structure

A website's authority comes from two places: links from other sites (backlinks) and the links connecting your own pages (internal links). Both are absolutely vital signals for search engines, but you need to assess them in completely different ways during an SEO audit.

Think of it like this: a site with fantastic content but a weak link profile is a brilliant shop tucked away down a dark, unsigned alley. No one's going to find it. This part of the audit is all about checking your external reputation and your internal signposting to make sure people and crawlers can find your best stuff.

Auditing Your Backlink Profile for Quality

Your backlink profile isn't just a numbers game; it's a direct reflection of your online reputation. I'd much rather see a handful of strong, authoritative links from relevant sites than thousands of spammy, low-quality ones. The goal here is quality over quantity, always.

First things first, you need a full picture of your backlinks. You'll need to know how to find pages that link to a page to understand who is vouching for you across the web. Grab a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush and start pulling your data.

As you dig in, focus on these key areas:

• Link Relevance: Are the sites linking to you actually related to your industry or niche? A link from a top-tier design blog to your Shopify store is gold. A link from a random gambling site? That’s a red flag.
• Domain Authority: Pay attention to the authority metrics of the linking sites (like Ahrefs' Domain Rating or Moz's Domain Authority). A consistent pattern of low-authority, spammy-looking links can point to negative SEO or past mistakes.
• Anchor Text: This is the clickable text in the link itself. A natural profile has a healthy mix of branded anchors ("Grumspot"), naked URLs (www.grumspot.co.uk), and some topical, keyword-focused text. If it's all exact-match keywords, that's a huge warning sign of over-optimisation.

This analysis helps you spot both your biggest wins and your most significant threats. Seeing what's working tells you where to double down on your outreach, while finding potentially toxic links is the first step to disavowing them before they hurt your rankings.

Improving Your Internal Linking and Site Architecture

While backlinks build your site's external authority, internal links are what spread that authority around your own site. A smart internal linking strategy guides both users and search engines to your most important pages. It ensures all that hard-earned "link equity" doesn't just sit on your homepage.

One of the most common—and critical—issues I find during audits is the dreaded orphaned page. These are pages with zero internal links pointing to them, making them practically invisible to search engines and impossible for your visitors to navigate to. A site crawler like Screaming Frog is your best friend for hunting these down.

Think of your internal links as the arteries of your website. They carry authority and relevance from your strongest pages—like your homepage—down to deeper pages like product collections and blog posts. Without those connections, important content gets isolated and fails to perform.

Beyond just fixing orphaned content, the audit needs to assess how strategically you're using links. For an ecommerce site, this means making sure your high-value category and product pages have a steady stream of internal links. For example, a blog post on "The Best Winter Jackets of 2026" must link directly to the jacket product pages it talks about. It seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how often it's missed.

Your site's structure should follow a logical pyramid. The main navigation forms the top, flowing down to category pages, which then link to sub-categories and, finally, individual product pages. This creates clear topical "silos" or "hubs" that signal expertise to Google. By auditing and optimising this flow, you can push authority precisely where you need it most to drive revenue.

Building Your Prioritised SEO Action Plan

An audit's findings are completely worthless without a clear, actionable plan. Let's be honest, a sprawling spreadsheet crammed with hundreds of issues is more likely to overwhelm your team than inspire action. The real value of an audit comes from turning that raw data into a strategic project plan that everyone can actually get behind.

This is where you bridge the gap between analysis and execution. The most effective way I’ve found to do this is with a simple prioritisation matrix. It’s nothing fancy, but it works. You just plot every issue you've found on two axes: potential impact (how much will this improve traffic or revenue?) versus required effort (how much time and resource will this take to fix?).

This simple exercise immediately brings clarity. It separates the high-impact, low-effort "quick wins" from the larger, more resource-intensive projects that need some serious planning.

From Issues to Actionable Tasks

Your goal here is to organise your findings into a logical sequence. For example, fixing a site-wide indexing error caused by a rogue robots.txt rule is always going to be a high-impact, high-priority task. It's a foundational fix—without it, none of your other optimisations will even see the light of day.

In contrast, while updating alt text on a few old blog images is good housekeeping, its impact is tiny compared to a critical indexing problem. The matrix makes these distinctions obvious.

Here’s a practical way to categorise your tasks:

• Quick Wins (High Impact, Low Effort): These are your immediate priorities. Think fixing incorrect canonical tags on your main category pages or optimising the titles of your top ten money-making pages. Get these done first.
• Major Projects (High Impact, High Effort): These are the big-ticket items, like a complete site speed overhaul or a content refresh for a key product category. These need proper planning, a budget, and collaboration across different teams.
• Fill-In Tasks (Low Impact, Low Effort): These are valuable but not urgent. This bucket includes things like fixing a handful of minor broken internal links or cleaning up meta descriptions on low-traffic pages.
• Reconsider (Low Impact, High Effort): These are the tasks that often provide very little return for the work involved. Honestly, it's usually best to park them or just ignore them entirely.

Crafting a Compelling Report for Stakeholders

With your priorities straight, the final step is to build a report that tells a clear story. Don’t just present a list of problems; nobody wants that. Instead, frame your findings as opportunities. Use your audit data to create a compelling narrative that outlines where you are now, where you want to be, and the exact steps to get there. For a deeper look at what goes into a professional audit report, our in-depth page audit service provides a structured example.

Your report absolutely must include a clear roadmap with timelines and assigned owners for each task. This is how you turn vague ideas into a concrete project plan. For instance, a technical fix for accessibility could be part of this roadmap. In the UK, businesses have a £17.1 billion market opportunity by improving web accessibility, yet an astonishing 94.8% of sites fail basic standards. This is how you secure buy-in and turn your SEO audit into a catalyst for real growth.

Frequently Asked Questions About SEO Audits

Even with the clearest workflow in front of you, a few questions always seem to come up when you're in the thick of an SEO audit. Let's tackle some of the most common ones we hear, giving you some straightforward answers to clear up any confusion.

How Often Should I Run an SEO Audit?

For a full, comprehensive, deep-dive audit, you'll want to schedule one annually. Think of this as your major strategic reset, a chance to really take stock of your progress over the last year and set a new direction. But don't make the mistake of waiting a full twelve months before checking in on your site's health.

I always advise clients to perform lighter 'health checks' every quarter. These aren't as exhaustive but are crucial for keeping your finger on the pulse. In these quarterly reviews, you should be looking at:

• Core Web Vitals scores
• Your indexing status in Google Search Console
• Any big swings in organic rankings or traffic

There are also times when a full audit becomes an immediate, non-negotiable priority. If you've just gone through a major site migration, a complete redesign, or if you're a fast-growing e-commerce store, you need to act fast. An audit will help you catch any critical errors before they can do serious damage to your organic performance.

Can I Do an SEO Audit Myself, or Should I Hire Someone?

You can absolutely get your hands dirty with a basic audit, and honestly, it’s a brilliant learning experience. Free tools like Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights will help you spot plenty of low-hanging fruit—think broken links or sluggish pages. It’s a great way to start.

But a truly strategic, deep-dive audit is a completely different animal. It requires a serious amount of expertise, a significant time commitment, and access to premium tools that can easily run into hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds a month.

An experienced consultant or agency doesn't just find surface-level mistakes. Their real value is in uncovering complex technical problems, digging up competitor insights, and turning a mountain of data into a prioritised, revenue-focused action plan. That’s incredibly hard to do on your own.

What’s the Biggest Mistake to Avoid in an SEO Audit?

Without a doubt, the single biggest mistake people make is failing to prioritise. It’s so easy to do. Many audits, especially those generated by automated tools, will spit out a gigantic, overwhelming list of ‘errors’ with zero context. But a great audit doesn't just find problems; it tells you which ones to fix first to get the biggest bang for your buck.

For instance, fixing a wonky canonical tag on your main product category page is infinitely more important than tweaking the alt text on a blog post from five years ago. Without a clear, impact-driven priority list, that audit report will just end up collecting digital dust, and you’ll miss a golden opportunity to make real, meaningful progress.

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At Grumspot, we specialise in meticulous SEO audits that pinpoint the exact issues holding back your Shopify store's growth. We then turn those findings into a clear, actionable roadmap designed to boost your traffic and conversions. Let's unlock your store's true potential.