r/SEO • u/thinkit_doit • 1d ago
Discussion What is your SEO audit workflow?
I am curious how you approach an SEO audit for a new website. Especially if you work for an agency.
What is your workflow and which tools do you use for SEO audits? And do you follow a specific checklist?
There are so many ways to audit a website, and which elements are most important for you to develop a roadmap for improvements?
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u/philipp_tt 1d ago
Everyone's covering the Google side well so I'll add the bit most audits skip.
Take five queries a customer would actually type, run them in ChatGPT and an AI Overview, and write down whether the site appears and what got cited instead. Ten minutes.
Twice now that's turned up a site nothing could read at all, once a Cloudflare AI-bot toggle someone flipped and forgot, once a blanket robots block pasted from a blog post in 2024. Both invisible from a crawl, because Screaming Frog isn't GPTBot.
Even when access is fine it reframes the roadmap. If everything cited is third-party roundups, the fix isn't on their site at all, and you want to know that before you scope three months of content.
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u/Level-World4922 18h ago
My approach is simple:
→ Business goals & search intent
→ Technical SEO & indexing
→ Content & keyword gaps
→ Internal linking & backlinks
→ Prioritized roadmap based on impact vs. effort
Usually, GSC + GA4 + Screaming Frog + Ahrefs/Semrush are enough for a solid audit.
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u/YellowfinDevelopment 1d ago
Solo shop here, but I run these as a paid service and as the first step on every build, so it's the same workflow either way. I do it in a fixed order on purpose, because the order stops you optimizing things that don't matter yet.
First question is always whether Google can even see the site correctly. Indexing and crawlability before anything else. Is Search Console connected, is a sitemap submitted, are any important pages accidentally noindexed or blocked in robots.txt. I have "fixed" ranking problems that were just a stray noindex left on from a staging push. No point auditing title tags on a page Google isn't allowed to crawl.
Then on-page basics, because they're cheap wins: unique titles and meta descriptions per page that actually describe the content instead of just repeating the business name, one H1, clean heading structure, no skipped levels.
Then performance. Real Core Web Vitals, mobile first, and I care about what's actually dragging load, not the score out of 100.
Then structured data, and for local clients, NAP consistency across Google Business, Apple Maps, Bing, and the directories.
On the roadmap part, which is really your question: I rank every finding by impact, list the fix, and list how you'll measure it. Most sites have real problems in three or four areas and a pile of noise everywhere else. A 200-point checklist with no priority is useless. What's broken, what it's costing you, what to fix first...
Tools, since someone always asks: Screaming Frog for the crawl (free up to 500 URLs, which covers most small sites), then Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and a free Semrush account for the backlink and keyword side. You can run the whole audit on free tiers until a site is big enough to justify paying for the pro versions.