Website audit process

Purpose of an audit

Identify technical and on-page SEO issues, and check crawlability, speed, and indexation status.

Types of audits

1. Manual audit: thorough but labour-intensive, checked by hand.
2. Tool-based audit: faster and scalable across many pages at once.

Recommended tools

• Screaming Frog
• Sitebulb
• Ahrefs Site Audit
• SEMrush Site Audit

Screaming Frog

Crawls a website the way a search-engine bot would, and checks for:

• Broken links
• Redirects
• Duplicate titles and descriptions
• Missing alt tags

Reading an automated audit report: a worked example

A grading-style audit tool (the kind that scores a site A+ to F- across On-Page SEO, Links, Usability, Performance, and Social) produces a report shaped like this, worked through here on a real report for leosbagels.com, a New York bagel shop's site, to show what each finding actually means.¹

Overall grades: C (On-Page SEO: C+, Links: C+, Usability: B, Performance: D, Social: D), "could be better," with 20 recommendations total.

Title tag: Leo's Bagels | New York City, 28 characters. The tool flags this because the ideal range is 50 to 60 characters: a title well under that range is a missed opportunity to include more ranking-relevant terms, not a broken tag.

Meta description: 180 characters, above the ideal 120 to 160 range. Both directions (too short or too long) draw a recommendation, because a search engine truncates or ignores a description outside that window.

Header tags: H1 present, multiple heading levels in use: H2 ×10, H3 ×12, H4 ×105, H5/H6 ×0. A large H4 count relative to H2/H3 usually means the heading hierarchy is being used for visual styling somewhere on the page rather than strictly for content structure, worth a manual check even though the tool doesn't flag it directly.

Keyword consistency: the page's main keywords ("bagels", "bagel", "leos", "fresh") were not well distributed across title, meta description, and heading tags, present in body content (frequency 14, 12, 10, 9) but under-used in the tags search engines weight most heavily.

Content amount: 798 words, judged sufficient ("a good level of textual content").

Image alt attributes: 43 images on the page, 16 missing the alt attribute (roughly 37%), a direct, countable on-page issue.

Canonical tag, robots.txt, noindex: no canonical tag set (Google's own recommendation is that every page specify one); no robots.txt could be retrieved at all; no noindex tag or header in use (so the page is at least crawlable, even without a sitemap-guiding robots.txt).

SSL and schema: HTTPS enabled and redirecting correctly (a pass); no Schema.org structured data detected anywhere on the page (a clear on-page gap, see Schema markup).

Rankings: a real, concrete ranking table is exactly what this kind of report is useful for: leosbagels.com's page ranks position 1 for "leo's bagels" (18,100 monthly searches) and several of its long-tail variants, position 11 and 15 for higher-volume brand variants (368,000 searches), and holds 30 total position-1 keywords against 1,489 keywords ranking only in positions 31 to 100, the estimated 65,977 monthly visits from search comes overwhelmingly from that small position-1 set, not the long tail of weak rankings.

Backlink summary: a "moderate" backlink profile: 1,100 total backlinks from 417 referring domains, split 923 dofollow / 150 nofollow, across 244 subnets and 286 IPs (subnet/IP diversity matters because many links from the same small IP range look manipulated rather than earned). The top individual backlinks are real editorial and directory placements: Airbnb's own city guide, El País (a national Spanish newspaper), Klook, Foursquare, a university innovation blog, Thrillist, Time Out New York, and Eater NY, domain strength 90 to 95, the kind of coverage a purely SEO-driven link-building campaign rarely produces on its own and that usually comes from being a genuinely well-known local business.

Reading a report like this in order, on-page tag issues first (cheap, fast fixes), then content/keyword distribution, then the structural gaps (schema, canonical, robots.txt), then the off-page picture last, is what turns a wall of automated findings into an actual priority list.¹

Footnotes

1. SEO AUDIT SAMPLE.pdf, an automated audit report for leosbagels.com, iSkills course material. ↩ ↩²