How to Do an SEO Audit (Step-by-Step, 2026)

Most SEO audit guides bury you in 80-point checklists. This one doesn't. We'll walk through the exact order to run an audit, what to fix first, and how to tell when you're done — using free tools the whole way.

The 4-phase audit framework

1. Crawl — make sure Google can reach every page that matters
2. Index — make sure the right pages are in Google's index, with the right metadata
3. Render — make sure pages load fast and pass Core Web Vitals
4. Earn — make sure each page targets a real query with real intent

Phase 1 — Crawl audit (10 minutes)

Run a site crawl with FreeSEO's free crawler. Look for: pages blocked by robots.txt, redirect chains longer than 1 hop, 4xx/5xx errors, orphan pages (no internal links), and a sitemap that's missing important routes.

Phase 2 — Index audit (15 minutes)

Open Search Console → Pages report. Compare 'Indexed' vs 'Not indexed'. For each Not-indexed reason, ask: is this intentional? Most sites have 20–40% of pages excluded for the wrong reason (canonical issues, soft 404s, or low-value pages bloating the crawl budget).

Phase 3 — Render audit (10 minutes)

PageSpeed Insights → run on your top 5 templates (home, product, blog post, category, contact). Anything below 75 mobile needs work. Focus on Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift — those are the two Core Web Vitals that move rankings.

Phase 4 — Earn audit (30 minutes)

For each top page, check: does the <title> match what someone would search? Does the H1 promise what the page delivers? Is there at least one specific, useful answer above the fold? Pages that just float keywords without answering the query never rank.

How to know you're done

Zero high-impact findings in the FreeSEO report, all top templates above 75 in PageSpeed, and Search Console's 'Indexed' count matches what you intended. That's a clean audit.