The SEO audit checklist that states its denominators

Most audits hand you four hundred rows and a score. This SEO audit checklist works the other way round: it tells you what was checked, what could not be, and what to fix first.

What an SEO audit is actually for

An audit is a measurement, and a measurement without a denominator is a rumour. Before you look at any score, ask what proportion of the site it describes. A 94 from a crawler that reached forty pages of a four-hundred-page site is not a better result than a 71 from a crawl that reached everything. It is a smaller claim wearing a bigger number.

That is the single habit worth taking from this checklist. Every section below ends with a note on what makes the check impossible to run, because a check that could not run is not a pass.

Indexability comes first

Nothing else on the list matters if an engine cannot reach and keep the page. Work through these before touching content:

• The page returns a 200, not a soft 404 or a redirect chain ending nowhere.
• robots.txt permits the crawlers you want, including the answer-engine ones.
• No conflicting noindex between the meta robots tag and the X-Robots-Tag header.
• The canonical tag points at a real, indexable URL rather than a 404 or a redirect.
• HTTPS with a valid certificate and no mixed content.

Cannot be checked when: the crawler is blocked outright, or the page sits behind authentication. Record those pages as unmeasured and count them in the denominator.

Rendering: what actually arrives

A page can be perfectly indexable and still arrive empty. Fetch your own page the way a crawler does and read what comes back:

curl -s https://yourdomain.com/pricing | grep -c "<h1"

If that returns zero, your headline is being painted by JavaScript after the fact. Googlebot will render it eventually, on a second pass it schedules at its convenience. Most answer-engine crawlers will not.

Structure and internal links

Site structure exists only across a full crawl, which is why a page-by-page audit cannot see it. Check that every page you care about is reachable by an internal link rather than through the sitemap alone, that click depth from the homepage stays shallow, and that filtered URLs do not multiply without limit.

1. Every page you care about is reachable by at least one internal link, not only through the sitemap.
2. Click depth from the homepage stays shallow. Pages six clicks deep get crawled rarely.
3. The sitemap lists pages that exist and return 200, and nothing else.
4. Faceted or filtered URLs do not generate near-infinite combinations.

Metadata that survives contact with a template

Metadata fails in templates rather than on individual pages. A title describing the site instead of the page, or an empty description left behind by scaffolding, repeats across every URL that template generates. Fixing the template fixes hundreds of pages at once, which is why this is the cheapest category to recover.

Before

<title>Pricing</title>
<meta name="description" content="">

After

<title>Pricing: plans, limits and what the free tier covers</title>
<meta name="description" content="Compare plans, see exactly what the free scan includes, and what each paid tier adds.">

An empty description is worse than a missing one. A missing tag lets the engine compose something from the page. An empty one is a statement that there is nothing worth saying.

Content health, measured across the corpus

Individual pages look fine on their own. The damage happens between them:

• Two or more pages targeting a single search intent, splitting the signal so none of them ranks.
• Near-duplicate titles, which are usually a symptom of near-duplicate content.
• Thin pages that dilute the site rather than extending it.
• Stale pages whose performance has been declining for months.

A quick way to find the first one: export your top queries, group by landing page, and look for a query where two of your own URLs both appear with weak positions. That pair is competing with itself.

Answer-engine readiness

Answer-engine readiness asks whether an AI answer can lift your content and credit you for it. Being indexed makes a page eligible; being cited depends on whether a passage states the answer directly, whether there is an author and a date to attribute it to, and whether those crawlers are permitted at all. It is the newest section of any SEO audit checklist and the one most sites skip.

• The answer is extractable: stated plainly under a heading that matches the question, not buried mid-essay.
• There is something to attribute, such as a named author, a date, and an organisation.
• An llms.txt exists and curates what is worth reading. The format is short and worth writing.
• Answer-engine crawlers are permitted, which a robots.txt written years ago often blocks by accident.

Page experience, weighted honestly

Speed matters and it matters less than the industry implies. A fast page with nothing to say still has nothing to say. Check Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, then stop. Most layout shift on content sites comes from images without width and height attributes, which is a ten-minute fix.

Cannot be checked when: field data is unavailable for a low-traffic page. Lab data is a substitute, not a replacement, and the report should say which one it used.

How to order the work

Severity alone is the wrong sort order, and it is the one almost everything uses. Rank by severity multiplied by the number of pages affected instead.

A missing meta description is low severity. A missing meta description on two hundred pages is the most valuable afternoon available to you, and a severity-sorted list will bury it under a single high-severity issue on a page nobody visits.

Turning the checklist into a habit

Run the full list quarterly, and the indexability and rendering sections after any template change or migration. Record the coverage figure every time, so you can tell a real improvement from a crawl that simply reached more pages.

If you would rather have it run for you, the free Crawld scorecard applies this checklist as 129 checks across eight weighted categories, and reports every check it could not run instead of rounding it up to a pass. The full rubric is published here, and the scoring method explains how coverage is calculated.

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