An SEO audit is a systematic review of your website's search engine optimisation. It identifies what's working, what's broken, and what opportunities you're missing. Think of it as a health check for your site's visibility in Google.
Why You Need an SEO Audit
Most websites have SEO issues they don't know about. Missing meta descriptions, slow page load times, broken links, poor mobile experience, missing schema markup — these problems accumulate over time and silently drag your rankings down.
An audit surfaces these issues in a structured way so you can fix them in priority order. Sites that run regular audits and act on the findings consistently outrank those that don't.
What an SEO Audit Covers
Technical SEO
The foundation. Is your site using HTTPS? Does it support HTTP/2? Are there console errors? Can search engines crawl and index your pages? Is your XML sitemap correct? Are there orphaned pages with no internal links?
Content Quality
Does every page have a unique title tag and meta description? Is the heading hierarchy correct (H1 → H2 → H3, no skipped levels)? Do images have descriptive alt text? Is the content substantial enough to rank, or is it thin?
Performance
Core Web Vitals are ranking factors. An audit measures Largest Contentful Paint (how fast your main content loads), Cumulative Layout Shift (how stable the page is while loading), and Total Blocking Time (how responsive the page is to user interaction).
Mobile Optimisation
Google uses mobile-first indexing — it ranks your site based on how it performs on mobile devices. An audit checks viewport configuration, font readability, tap target sizes, and whether content fits the screen without horizontal scrolling.
How to Run an SEO Audit
You can audit your site manually by checking each element above, but this is time-consuming and easy to miss things. Automated tools like WordPress AI Plugin's built-in SEO audit use Google Lighthouse under the hood to check everything systematically.
Our audit tool offers four modes: Quick (5 pages, under a minute), Comprehensive (50 pages, 3-5 minutes), Technical Focus (10 pages, server and speed emphasis), and Content Focus (20 pages, headings and meta data emphasis).
After the audit completes, you receive scores out of 100 for each category, a list of specific issues found, and AI-generated recommendations sorted by priority and expected impact.
How Often to Audit
Run a comprehensive audit monthly. Run quick audits weekly if you're actively making changes to your site. After any major update (theme change, plugin update, content restructure), run an immediate audit to catch any regressions.
Track your scores over time. Consistent improvement in audit scores correlates with ranking improvements — usually with a 4-8 week lag as Google recrawls and reindexes your updated pages.