The same diagnostic framework we apply in enterprise SEO programs, turned into a tool you can use right now. Answer 48 checkpoints and get your weighted score, a breakdown by dimension and an action plan prioritized by impact. No sign-up needed to use the tool.
If Google cannot get in, you cannot rank. Coverage, robots, sitemaps, crawl budget and rendering.
Core Web Vitals on field data, canonicals, hreflang, structured data and architecture.
Cannibalization, topical coverage, CTR, content pruning and real experience signals.
Orphan pages, internal authority flow, backlink quality and linkable assets.
AI Overviews, LLM citations, entity consistency and extractable content.
Pipeline attribution, alerting, deploy QA and prioritization by expected return.
Answer each checkpoint based on your site today. Every negative answer reveals the recommended corrective action and feeds your prioritized plan. Critical checkpoints weigh more in the final score.
If Google cannot crawl and index your site, nothing else matters.
Do your key pages show up when you search site:yourdomain.com?
The site: operator gives you a quick snapshot of what is indexed. Compare that number with your real count of useful URLs.
Does your robots.txt allow crawling of the sections you want to rank?
A Disallow inherited from staging is one of the most common causes of total traffic collapse.
Do you have an up-to-date sitemap.xml submitted in Search Console?
A sitemap should contain only 200, canonical, indexable URLs. No redirects, no parameters.
Do you track pages that are crawled but not indexed?
When Google crawls and decides not to index, it is usually a quality, duplication or perceived value problem.
Is your crawl budget spent on URLs that matter?
On large sites, filters and parameters consume most of the crawl budget.
Is your main content visible without executing JavaScript?
If the initial HTML arrives empty, you depend on Google's second rendering wave.
Do www/non-www and http/https all resolve to a single canonical URL?
Four accessible versions of the same site split signals and multiply duplicates.
Do you review 404 errors and redirect chains regularly?
Chains longer than two hops dilute signals and slow down crawling.
Speed, stability and site architecture on real devices.
Do you pass Core Web Vitals on field data (CrUX) for mobile?
Lab data tends to be optimistic. What counts is the 75th percentile of real users.
Is your mobile LCP under 2.5 seconds?
LCP is usually the main image or the large text block in the hero.
Is the site genuinely usable on mobile, not just responsive?
Google indexes mobile-first: whatever is missing from the mobile version does not exist.
Do you have valid structured data on your key templates?
Organization, Article, Product, FAQ, BreadcrumbList and LocalBusiness depending on page type.
Are your canonical tags self-referencing and consistent?
A canonical pointing elsewhere tells Google to ignore that page.
If you operate across countries or languages, is hreflang bidirectional and complete?
Broken hreflang causes cannibalization across markets and the wrong URL ranking.
Does your architecture keep business pages within three clicks?
Click depth correlates with crawl frequency and with the value Google assigns.
Is HTTPS correct across the whole site, with no mixed content?
Resources loaded over http break the security signal and can be blocked.
If content does not answer the intent, no technical fix will save it.
Does every key page target a single, defined search intent?
Two pages chasing the same term compete with each other and neither wins.
Do you cover the full topic or just the head keyword?
Google evaluates topical coverage, not keyword density.
Are your titles and meta descriptions written for CTR, not only for keywords?
Improving CTR in positions 3 to 10 is the fastest lever for extra traffic.
Is there a single H1 per page and a logical H2/H3 hierarchy?
Hierarchy helps both users and snippet extraction.
Do you update and prune old content systematically?
Stale content drags down the perceived quality of the entire domain.
Does your content demonstrate real experience (E-E-A-T)?
First-party data, verifiable authorship and concrete cases separate you from generic AI content.
Do you optimize images with descriptive alt text and coherent file names?
Image search and accessibility add traffic and semantic context.
Do your commercial pages have unique content instead of duplicated specs?
Replicated manufacturer descriptions are the usual cause of invisible catalogs.
How authority flows inside and toward your domain.
Do your money pages receive internal links from your highest-authority content?
Internal linking is the cheapest and most ignored lever in enterprise SEO.
Do you use descriptive anchor text instead of 'read more' or 'here'?
Anchor text tells Google what the destination page is about.
Do you have orphan pages with no inbound internal links?
A page with no internal links almost never ranks, even when it sits in the sitemap.
Do you know your backlink profile and its real quality?
Volume is not authority: topical relevance and the referring domain's traffic are what count.
Do you have assets designed specifically to attract links?
Calculators, benchmarks and original research earn links passively and consistently.
Are your breadcrumbs consistent and marked up with schema?
They clarify architecture and improve appearance in results.
Do you monitor broken outbound links or links to low-quality domains?
Broken links degrade experience and signal a poorly maintained site.
Does your brand generate its own searches and off-site mentions?
Brand demand directly amplifies organic results and AI citations.
AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and social search already split the clicks.
Do you know which queries surface your brand inside AI-generated answers?
Most teams still do not measure their presence in AI Overviews or LLMs.
Does your content answer questions extractably in the opening paragraphs?
Models cite concise, self-contained blocks with a direct answer.
Do you publish original data a model can cite?
LLMs cite proprietary numbers and studies far more than generic opinion.
Is your entity information consistent across the web?
Models build your brand entity from cross-referenced sources.
Do you allow access to the AI crawlers you care about?
Blocking every AI bot removes any chance of being cited.
Are you building presence on social search surfaces?
YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Reddit feed both discovery and AI answers.
Do you have structured FAQs on informational pages?
Well-marked questions make extraction easier in both Google and LLMs.
Do you measure traffic arriving from AI assistants?
Without segmentation, that traffic disappears into referral or direct.
SEO that is not connected to pipeline is a cost center.
Are Search Console and analytics configured with no data leaks?
Without clean data there is no diagnosis, only intuition.
Can you attribute leads or revenue to the organic channel?
Session-based reporting does not survive a conversation with finance.
Do you track rankings by business cluster rather than isolated keywords?
Cluster tracking shows strategic progress instead of daily noise.
Do you have alerts for drops in traffic, indexing or performance?
Spotting a drop two months late multiplies the cost of recovery.
Is there an SEO QA step before every deploy?
Most severe SEO incidents are born in an unreviewed release.
Do you quantify organic opportunity in money before prioritizing?
Prioritizing without a value model means shipping what is easy, not what pays.
Do you benchmark your visibility against direct competitors?
Absolute growth misleads when the whole market grows faster.
Does your SEO roadmap have owners, deadlines and allocated capacity?
The real bottleneck in enterprise SEO is execution, not diagnosis.
Start answering the checkpoints and your score, dimension breakdown and prioritized plan are calculated in real time.
An SEO audit is a structured diagnosis of a site against the factors that determine its ability to capture organic traffic: whether search engines can crawl and index it, whether the content answers real search intent, whether the architecture pushes authority toward the pages that generate business, and whether all of that is measured in a way that supports decisions.
Most audits on the market fail for the same reason: they deliver two hundred findings sorted by tool instead of by impact. A report like that paralyzes teams. A useful audit does the opposite: it reduces noise, separates growth blockers from cosmetic issues, and sequences the work so a real team can execute it in real quarters.
This is the framework behind the tool on this page. Each dimension answers a different question and none works without the others.
Before discussing keywords, answer whether Google can get in, crawl and choose to index. That means robots.txt, sitemap.xml, the Search Console coverage report, rendering without JavaScript and, on large sites, how crawl budget is actually spent according to server logs.
The most expensive pattern we find in enterprise audits is a site with hundreds of thousands of crawlable URLs where only a fraction has any demand behind it. The crawler burns its budget on filter combinations while business pages get revisited once a month.
Core Web Vitals measured on field data, not lab data. Self-referencing canonicals. Bidirectional hreflang with reciprocal return tags. Valid structured data per template. Controlled click depth. These signals do not rank a page on their own, but their absence prevents you from competing in markets where results are otherwise evenly matched.
Here you review intent mapping per URL, cannibalization between pages chasing the same term, topical coverage versus what already ranks, CTR on pages with many impressions and few visits, and the presence of verifiable experience signals. With how much generic AI content now floods every vertical, first-party data and concrete cases moved from nice-to-have to primary differentiator.
Internal linking is the cheapest and most wasted lever in SEO. In nearly every audit we find priority commercial pages receiving fewer internal links than a three-year-old blog post. Fixing that distribution often produces movement within weeks, without publishing a single new line of content.
AI-generated answers already absorb a meaningful share of attention on informational queries, and most teams do not measure whether their brand is cited. Auditing this layer means defining a business query set, systematically checking whether your domain appears as a source, understanding what makes the cited sources citable, and adjusting content so it is extractable without losing context.
An audit that ends in rankings and sessions does not survive a budget meeting. This layer checks attribution to leads and revenue, tracking by business cluster, automated alerting on drops, SEO QA on every deploy, and a model that translates organic opportunity into money before prioritizing.
Auditing for its own sake produces long, inert reports. Before opening a single tool, define which decision the audit must enable: recovering a drop, justifying investment, preparing a migration or finding the next growth lever. Scope changes radically with that answer.
Search Console with a domain property and at least sixteen months of history, analytics with verified events, a full site crawl, field performance data and, on large sites, at least thirty days of server logs.
Exactly what the tool on this page does: 48 checkpoints weighted by criticality. Working from checkpoints avoids the bias of auditing only what you are already good at, the most common failure when the audit is run by the team that built the site.
Every finding needs an impact estimate and an effort estimate. Without both, the team ships what is easy instead of what pays. A rough but consistent model beats false precision: potential traffic per cluster, estimated CTR by position, historical conversion rate and lead value.
Tickets with an owner, an estimate and an assigned sprint. Without that translation, the most rigorous audit in the world gets archived. In our experience the enterprise SEO bottleneck is never diagnosis: it is sustained implementation over the months it takes to pay off.
Full audit annually, technical review quarterly, continuous monitoring of indexing and performance, and mandatory QA before every meaningful deploy. SEO degrades by default: each unchecked release adds invisible technical debt.
| Type | Scope | Price range | When it makes sense |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-audit with checklist | Surface diagnosis across six dimensions | Free | Spotting obvious blockers and sequencing first moves |
| Standard technical audit | Full crawl, content and linking | USD 300 to 900 | Small and mid-sized sites up to a few thousand URLs |
| Deep audit | Logs, architecture, international, competitors | USD 2,500 to 8,000 | Ecommerce, marketplaces and multi-market sites |
| Enterprise audit with support | Diagnosis, opportunity model and implemented roadmap | USD 8,000+ | Organisations where execution, not diagnosis, is the constraint |
If your score landed below 40, your priority is not publishing content: it is repairing foundations. Between 40 and 65, the largest return usually comes from consolidating cannibalized content and rerouting internal links toward commercial pages. Between 65 and 85, growth will come from deep topical coverage, authority and presence on AI surfaces. Above 85, advantage is won through first-party data and execution speed.
For the next step, the SEO maturity assessment evaluates the organisational capability behind the site, and our technical SEO service covers implementation of everything this audit leaves on the table.
The printable version of the full framework: all 48 checkpoints grouped by dimension with their criticality level. Use it as pre-deploy QA, as a brief for an agency, or as the base of your in-house quarterly roadmap.
An SEO audit is a structured diagnosis of a website against the criteria that determine its search visibility: indexing, technical performance, content quality and coverage, internal linking, authority, visibility inside AI answers and business measurement. The goal is not a list of errors but a prioritized set of actions ranked by impact on qualified traffic and revenue.
Six phases: 1) verify indexing and crawling with Search Console and the site: operator; 2) review technical performance and Core Web Vitals using field data; 3) audit content by search intent and detect cannibalization; 4) map internal linking and the backlink profile; 5) measure visibility in AI Overviews and assistants; 6) connect everything to business metrics and prioritize by expected return. The tool on this page walks through all six with 48 checkpoints.
A basic audit for a small site typically runs between USD 300 and 900. A deep technical audit for ecommerce or enterprise sites with tens of thousands of URLs ranges from USD 2,500 to 15,000 depending on scope, log analysis, international complexity and whether implementation support is included. The self-audit on this page is free and covers the same checkpoints we use as the baseline in our own diagnostics.
A full audit once a year is the reasonable minimum. For sites with frequent deploys, dynamic catalogs or multiple markets, we recommend a quarterly technical review plus continuous monitoring of indexing, Core Web Vitals and 5xx errors. Always audit before and after a migration, redesign or CMS change.
The minimum stack is Google Search Console, an analytics platform and a crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Add PageSpeed Insights and CrUX field data for performance, a keyword platform for demand and competition, and server log access to understand real crawl behaviour on large sites.
Not on its own. An audit identifies and prioritizes; results depend on execution. In practice the bottleneck is rarely the diagnosis: it is the team's capacity to ship technical fixes, publish content and sustain authority work over the months it takes to compound.
A technical audit focuses on whether Google can crawl, render and index your site efficiently: robots, sitemaps, canonicals, hreflang, performance, architecture and structured data. A content audit evaluates whether what you publish answers search intent, whether cannibalization exists, and whether topical coverage and experience signals are sufficient. Technical work enables; content converts that enablement into traffic.
Define a priority query set for the business and periodically check whether the brand is cited in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and other assistants. Then analyze which sources are being cited for those queries and what makes them citable: first-party data, extractable answers, entity consistency and topical authority. It is a new audit layer most teams still do not measure.
We analyze logs, Search Console, architecture, content, authority and AI visibility, and deliver a roadmap prioritized by revenue impact with effort estimates and suggested owners. No PDF that gets archived: we stay through implementation.