By SitemapFixer Team
Updated April 2026

SEO Audit Checklist: 25 Checks for Any Website

Run 12 of these checks automatically - freeAnalyze My Site Free

Use this checklist when auditing a new site, after a migration, or quarterly to catch regressions. Work through Technical SEO first - a site with broken crawling or indexing needs that fixed before on-page or content work has any impact. For the sitemap and indexing items on this checklist, SitemapFixer's free SEO audit handles the scanning automatically.

Technical SEO

Site is fully on HTTPS with valid SSL certificate and HTTP redirects to HTTPS via 301
Canonical domain is consistent - www or non-www, not both accessible
Sitemap.xml exists, is valid XML, contains only canonical 200-status URLs, and is submitted to Google Search Console
Robots.txt exists at /robots.txt, does not block Googlebot from important pages, and references sitemap URL
Site loads in under 2.5 seconds (LCP) on mobile - check PageSpeed Insights
Core Web Vitals pass in Google Search Console: LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1
No redirect chains - all redirects go directly to final destination in one hop
No 404 errors for linked pages - check Search Console Crawl Stats
Site is mobile-friendly - viewport meta tag present, no tap targets too small
Structured data (schema) present on key pages and passing Google Rich Results Test

Indexing

All important pages are indexed - check Search Console Indexing report
No valuable pages have noindex tags accidentally
No pages with noindex are also in the sitemap (contradiction)
Duplicate content managed with canonical tags or 301 redirects
Thin content pages (under 300 words) are either improved, consolidated, or noindexed
Pagination handled correctly - either paginated URLs or infinite scroll with discrete URLs

On-Page SEO

Every page has a unique, descriptive title tag under 60 characters with primary keyword near the start
Every page has a unique meta description 120-155 characters that describes the page accurately
One H1 per page that includes the primary keyword and matches the page title intent
Internal links use descriptive anchor text and connect related pages
Images have descriptive alt text, are compressed, and have explicit width and height attributes
Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image at 1200x630px) on all key pages

Off-Page SEO

Backlink profile reviewed for spammy or unnatural links using Ahrefs or Semrush
No manual actions in Google Search Console under Security and Manual Actions
Brand mentions and citations consistent (NAP consistency for local businesses)
Automate the technical checks
SitemapFixer runs 12 of these checks in 60 seconds - free
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