SEO Audit Checklist: What to Check on Your Website

Open Google Search Console and navigate to the Pages report (under Indexing). This shows you how many of your pages Google has indexed and any issues preventing indexation. If Google has not indexed your most important pages, they will never appear in search results, no matter how good your content is.

Common problems: pages accidentally blocked by robots.txt, noindex tags left over from development, orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them, and redirect chains that confuse crawlers. Fix any "Excluded" or "Error" pages that should be indexed.

Your XML sitemap tells Google about every page on your site. Check that it exists (usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml), that it is submitted in Google Search Console, and that it only includes pages you actually want indexed. A sitemap with broken URLs, redirects, or noindexed pages sends mixed signals to Google.

Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt and check that you are not accidentally blocking important pages or directories. A common mistake is leaving a development-era "Disallow: /" rule that blocks your entire site from Google. Your robots.txt should allow access to all important pages and only block admin areas, duplicates, or private content.

Go to pagespeed.web.dev and test your homepage, your most important service page, and one blog post. Test both mobile and desktop. Your mobile score matters more since Google uses mobile-first indexing.

Target scores: Green (90-100) is great. Yellow (50-89) means there is room for improvement. Red (0-49) means speed is likely hurting your rankings and you need to fix it.

The most common speed killers for small business websites: unoptimized images (uploading 4MB photos when 200KB would work), too many plugins or third-party scripts, cheap shared hosting, and bloated website builders that load unnecessary code on every page.

Core Web Vitals are Google's specific metrics for user experience. There are three main ones:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly the main content of your page loads. Target: under 2.5 seconds. If your hero image takes 5 seconds to appear, that is a problem.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly your page responds when someone clicks or taps. Target: under 200 milliseconds. Sluggish buttons and unresponsive menus hurt this metric.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much the page content jumps around as it loads. Target: under 0.1. If your text shifts down after an ad or image loads, that is layout shift and it frustrates users.

Check these in Google Search Console under Core Web Vitals (under Experience). Fix any pages flagged as "Poor" first, then work on "Needs Improvement."

Pull up your website on your phone and test every page. Check for these common problems:

Text too small to read. If visitors need to pinch and zoom to read your content, your mobile experience is broken. Body text should be at least 16px.

Buttons or links too close together. On a phone, tap targets need enough spacing that users do not accidentally hit the wrong one. This is especially common in navigation menus and footer links.

Content wider than the screen. Horizontal scrolling on mobile is a sign of elements that are not responsive. Tables, images, and embedded content are common culprits.

Forms that are hard to fill out. If your contact form requires precise tapping on tiny fields, you are losing leads. Make form inputs large enough to tap easily and use appropriate input types (email keyboards for email fields, phone keyboards for phone fields).

Google Search Console has a dedicated Mobile Usability report that flags specific issues on your pages. Fix everything it flags.

Check every page on your site for a unique, descriptive title tag. Common problems: duplicate titles across multiple pages, titles that are too long (over 60 characters get cut off in search results), generic titles like "Home" or "Services," and missing title tags entirely. Each title should include a relevant keyword and your location if you are a local business.

Every page should have a unique meta description under 155 characters that summarizes the page content and includes a call to action. Missing or duplicate meta descriptions mean Google will auto-generate a snippet, which is rarely as compelling as one you write yourself.

Each page should have exactly one H1 tag. Use H2 tags for major sections and H3 tags for subsections. Common problems: multiple H1 tags on a single page, skipping heading levels (going from H1 to H4), and using headings just for visual styling instead of content structure. Think of headings as an outline. If the outline does not make sense, neither does your heading structure.

Check every image on your site for descriptive alt text. Missing alt text is one of the most common SEO issues we see on small business websites. Right-click an image in your browser, select "Inspect," and look for the alt attribute. If it is empty, generic ("image"), or just the file name, fix it with a descriptive phrase that tells Google what the image shows.

Schema markup is structured data that helps Google understand your content. For local businesses, LocalBusiness schema should include your business name, address, phone number, hours, and geo-coordinates. Test your existing schema at validator.schema.org by pasting your page URL.

Other valuable schema types: FAQPage (for FAQ sections, can earn rich snippets in search results), Service (lists your specific services), Review/AggregateRating (shows star ratings in search results), and BreadcrumbList (shows your site hierarchy in search results).

If you do not have any schema markup on your site, you are missing an opportunity. If implementing schema is beyond your comfort level, this is exactly the kind of technical SEO work we handle at St Pete Sites.

Broken links (404 errors) hurt user experience and waste Google's crawl budget. Use a free broken link checker tool (there are many online, just search "broken link checker") to scan your entire site. Fix broken internal links by updating the URL or removing the link. For broken external links, either update them to the correct URL or remove them.

Check your redirects too. Redirect chains (page A redirects to B, which redirects to C) slow things down and dilute ranking signals. Each redirect should go directly to the final destination. In Google Search Console, check the Pages report for any "Page with redirect" or "Not found (404)" issues.

Verify your site uses HTTPS (the padlock icon in the browser). If any pages load over HTTP, set up a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. Check for mixed content warnings (pages that load over HTTPS but include resources like images or scripts over HTTP). Mixed content can trigger browser warnings that scare away visitors.

Make sure your SSL certificate is valid and not expired. An expired certificate shows a scary full-page browser warning that effectively blocks all traffic. Set a calendar reminder to renew before expiration, or use a provider with auto-renewal.