Searchlab How to Run a Full Website SEO Audit (and What to Fix First)
A website audit checks every signal Google uses to rank you, technical health, on-page quality, speed, authority and security, then hands you a prioritised fix list. The trick is knowing which failures actually move rankings and which are noise.
What a complete audit actually covers
- Crawlability. Can Googlebot reach every page you care about? Check robots.txt, sitemap coverage, redirect chains and orphan pages.
- Indexation. Being crawled is not being indexed. Compare pages submitted against pages actually in the index.
- On-page. Titles, meta descriptions, one H1 per page, heading order, image alt text, internal links.
- Performance. Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP and CLS, measured on real devices, not just a lab score.
- Authority. Referring domains, link quality and how you compare to the sites already ranking.
- Security. HTTPS everywhere, valid certificate, no mixed content, sensible security headers.
Fix in this order, not the order the report lists them
- Anything blocking indexing. A stray noindex tag or a bad robots.txt rule outranks every other problem. Nothing else matters if Google cannot index the page.
- Broken internal links and redirect chains. They waste crawl budget and leak authority.
- Duplicate or missing titles and descriptions. Cheap to fix, immediate effect on click-through.
- Core Web Vitals failures. Usually oversized images and render-blocking scripts.
- Thin or overlapping content. Merge near-duplicate pages instead of letting them compete with each other.
- Missing structured data. The last 10 percent, and the one that unlocks rich results.
The mistake most people make: treating a 100-item audit as a 100-item to-do list. Ten items usually account for most of the lost traffic. Sort by impact, not by the order the tool printed them.
How often to audit
- Monthly for the ten pages that earn you the most traffic.
- Quarterly for the whole site.
- Immediately after a redesign, migration, CMS change or platform update. These are where silent, catastrophic SEO damage happens.
Frequently asked
How long does a full audit take?
The scan itself takes under a minute. Working through the findings is the real job: budget a day for a small site, a week or more for a large one.
Do I need to fix every single warning?
No. Warnings are ranked by severity for a reason. Clear the errors first, then work down. Some warnings are irrelevant to your setup.
Why did my audit score drop without any changes?
Something external usually shifted: a third-party script got slower, an image was re-uploaded at full size, an outbound link died, or a certificate expired. This is exactly why recurring audits matter.