SEO Audit Checklist: 40 Checks to Run in 2026

An SEO audit checks four things in order: whether Google can crawl the site, whether it indexes the right pages, whether those pages answer the query better than the competition, and whether anything is actively harming the domain. Work in that sequence. Fixing content on a page Google cannot reach is wasted effort.

This checklist covers the forty checks that matter for a UK site in 2026, grouped by the order you should run them. Each section notes the tool and the primary Google documentation behind the check.

Before you start

You need three things. Verified access to Google Search Console, analytics access, and a crawl of the site from a tool such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Without Search Console you are guessing at indexation, and indexation is where most audits find their biggest wins.

1. Crawling

• Check robots.txt for accidental disallow rules on important directories.
• Confirm robots.txt returns 200 and is not blocking CSS or JavaScript needed to render pages.
• Check the XML sitemap exists, is referenced in robots.txt and is submitted in Search Console.
• Confirm the sitemap contains only indexable, canonical, 200 status URLs.
• Review the Search Console crawl stats report for response time and error spikes.
• Identify redirect chains longer than one hop and flatten them.
• Find internal links pointing at 404s and repoint them.
• Check for orphan pages with no internal links at all.
• On large sites, check faceted navigation is not generating unbounded crawlable URL combinations.
• Confirm pagination is crawlable and not JavaScript only.

2. Indexing

• Compare the Search Console page indexing report against your sitemap count. Large gaps are the headline finding of most audits.
• Review every “crawled, currently not indexed” URL. This usually signals thin or duplicate content.
• Check for unintended noindex tags, especially on templated sections.
• Confirm canonical tags are self-referencing on canonical pages and correct on duplicates.
• Check for duplicate canonicals across templates, a common theme bug.
• Verify parameter URLs, print views and session IDs are not being indexed.
• Check http, non-www, trailing slash and uppercase variants all 301 redirect to one canonical form.
• For multi-region sites, validate hreflang annotations return and reciprocate correctly.
• Confirm staging or development subdomains are not indexed.
• Check the index for pages that should have been retired and are still live.

3. On-page and content

• Every indexable page has one unique H1 that matches the page’s purpose.
• Title tags are unique, descriptive and lead with the term the page targets. Google’s guidance on title links explains what it will and will not rewrite.
• Meta descriptions are unique and written to earn a click, not to repeat the title.
• Heading hierarchy is logical, with no skipped levels used for styling.
• The first hundred words answer the query the page targets.
• Each page targets one primary intent. Two pages chasing the same intent is cannibalisation.
• Images carry descriptive alt text and are served in a modern format at sensible dimensions.
• Internal links use descriptive anchor text, never “click here” or “read more”.
• Key commercial pages are linked from the main navigation or from high authority pages.
• Content matches Google’s people-first content guidance, with clear authorship and evidence of expertise.

4. Technical performance

• Check Core Web Vitals in the Search Console report, using field data rather than lab scores.
• Largest Contentful Paint is usually a hero image or a web font. Preload the first and subset the second.
• Interaction to Next Paint is usually third party JavaScript. Audit tag manager containers.
• Cumulative Layout Shift is usually images without dimensions or late injected banners.
• Confirm the site is served over HTTPS with no mixed content warnings.
• Test the mobile rendering of key templates rather than the homepage alone.
• Validate structured data with the Rich Results Test and fix errors before adding new types.
• Check server response times under load, particularly on category and search templates.

5. Risk and off-site

• Review the backlink profile for paid or manipulative patterns that breach Google’s spam policies.
• Check Search Console for manual actions and security issues.
• Compare traffic drops against the Google ranking updates log before blaming a site change.
• Audit for hacked content, injected pages and unexpected outbound links.

6. AI search readiness

Add one more pass in 2026. Check whether AI crawlers can reach the site, because a robots.txt rule that blocks them removes you from AI answer surfaces. Google documents its crawler list, including Google-Extended, in its crawler overview, and OpenAI documents GPTBot separately. Google also publishes guidance on how AI features use your content.

Decide deliberately whether to allow each crawler. Blocking them is a valid commercial choice. Blocking them by accident, through an inherited robots.txt, is not.

How to prioritise the findings

An audit that hands over ninety findings with no priority order is a document, not a plan. The output should be a backlog a developer can work through, with each item stating the problem, the affected URLs, the fix and how to verify it went live.

How often to run one

A full audit once a year, a technical crawl monthly, and Search Console checked weekly. Run an extra full audit before and after any migration, redesign or CMS change, because those are the events that break sites. Google notes that SEO changes take months to have an effect, so audit findings need to reach production early rather than sitting in a queue.

If you would rather have this run for you, Terrier delivers standalone audits with a prioritised backlog, described on the SEO audits page. Ongoing implementation sits inside a retainer from £1,250 a month, with the bands on the SEO pricing page.

Turning findings into tickets

The gap between an audit and a result is implementation, and implementation fails for predictable reasons. A PDF lands in an inbox. Nobody owns it. The developer cannot tell which of the ninety findings matters. Six months later the same audit gets commissioned again.

Write findings as tickets instead. Each one should state the problem in one sentence, list the affected URLs or the template, describe the fix in terms a developer can act on, and state the verification step. A ticket that says “improve internal linking” will not ship. A ticket that says “add a related products block to the product template linking to four items from the same category, verified by crawling twenty product URLs and confirming four internal links each” will.

Group tickets by template rather than by URL wherever possible. One template fix usually resolves thousands of URLs, and that framing makes the business case for the developer time obvious.

What an audit will not tell you

An audit is a diagnosis, not a strategy. It will tell you what is broken and what is wasteful. It will not tell you which markets are worth entering, which products deserve content investment, or whether your pricing is the reason your conversion rate is poor.

It is also a snapshot. A site that passes every check today can break tomorrow through a plugin update, a theme change or a migration. That is why the monthly crawl matters more than the annual audit for most sites. The audit finds the problems you do not know about. The monitoring catches the ones you create.

Finally, an audit cannot substitute for authority. A technically perfect site in a competitive market still loses to a technically adequate one with better content and stronger independent coverage.

Frequently asked questions

How long does an SEO audit take?
A small site takes a few days. A large e-commerce catalogue takes two to three weeks, mostly because crawl analysis and log review take time.

What is the most common finding?
An indexation gap. Sites routinely have commercial pages Google has crawled and chosen not to index, and nobody has looked at the report.

Do I need paid tools?
Search Console and a crawler cover most of the checklist. Paid tools speed up backlink and competitor analysis rather than unlocking anything essential.

Should I fix everything at once?
No. Ship the P0 and P1 items first and verify each one. Bundling forty changes into one release makes it impossible to attribute the result.

How do I know the audit was any good?
Every finding should name the affected URLs and the verification step. Generic advice with no URLs attached is a template, not an audit.

Related pages

• SEO audits
• SEO pricing and packages
• SEO consultancy
• Schedule a call to have the checklist run against your site.