An SEO audit is a review of how well a site can be crawled, indexed, understood and chosen by search engines, and increasingly by AI search features that draw on the same index. A good audit checks the technical foundations, the content against what people search for, the internal and external links, and how the site appears in results, then turns what it finds into a short list of changes ranked by likely impact and effort. A crawler export with a thousand warnings is raw material, not an audit.
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What a useful audit covers
Scope depends on the site, but for a B2B SaaS site most audits work through the same areas. Each finding should name the affected URLs, explain why it matters for this site, and say what to change.
- Indexing: which pages Google has indexed, which it has not, and why, from the Page indexing report
- Crawling: robots.txt rules, redirects, status codes, sitemaps and how deep important pages sit
- Rendering: whether content and links appear in the HTML Google renders, not only in the browser
- Duplication: canonical tags, parameter URLs, staging copies and near-identical pages
- Content: whether money pages match the intent of the queries they target, and where pages compete with each other
- Internal links: whether product, pricing, integration and comparison pages get links from the pages that earn traffic
- Search appearance: title links, snippets, structured data and site name
- Performance and page experience: Core Web Vitals from field data, not just a lab score
How to judge one
Google's own advice on hiring an SEO is a good test. An audit should give realistic estimates of improvement and of the work involved, and the person running it needs read access to Search Console, not write access. Anyone who guarantees a first-place ranking is telling you something Google says no one can promise.
The best audits are short at the top. They lead with the handful of issues that block revenue pages, separate those from cosmetic warnings, and say who needs to do each fix: a developer, a writer or the marketing team.
When to run one
Before and after a site migration or redesign, when organic traffic drops and the cause is not obvious, when you take over a site from another team or agency, and before you plan a content programme, so new pages are not built on a site that cannot get them indexed.
Example
An audit that leads with one fix
A fictional analytics product, Tallyroot, asks for an audit after its new integration pages fail to appear in search. The crawl flags hundreds of minor issues, but the Page indexing report shows the integration pages as Discovered - currently not indexed, and the crawl shows they are linked only from a JavaScript filter that renders no anchor links.
The audit puts that at the top: add plain links to the integration directory and from each relevant product page. Missing alt text and long title tags go in a later batch.
Common mistakes
Treating tool warnings as findings
Crawler warnings are generic. A finding explains why an issue matters on this site and which pages it affects.
No priorities
An unranked list of every issue tends to get none of them fixed. Rank by impact on pages that drive pipeline, then by effort.
Auditing without Search Console data
A crawl shows what is on the site. Search Console shows what Google actually indexed and how pages perform. You need both.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on site size and scope. A small marketing site can be reviewed far faster than a site with thousands of programmatic pages, docs and several subdomains.
Yes. Search Console, a desktop crawler and Google's documentation cover most of it. The harder part is judging which findings matter, which is where experience helps.
Run a full audit around big changes such as migrations, and keep lighter monthly checks of indexing, crawl errors and key pages in between.
Keep reading
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines and AI crawlers fetch, render, understand and index a site's pages without friction.
- Google Search Console: Google’s free tool for site owners that shows which searches bring up a site, how often it is clicked, and whether Google can crawl and index its pages.
- Page Indexing Report: The Page indexing report in Google Search Console shows which of your URLs Google has indexed and gives a reason for each one it has not.
- Crawlability: Crawlability is how easily search engine and AI crawlers can discover and fetch the pages on a site.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's free console for site owners. It shows how Bing crawls and indexes a site and offers SEO reports and URL submission.
- Content delivery network: A CDN is a network of servers worldwide that caches and serves a site's files close to each visitor, cutting load times and shielding the origin server.
- Crawl Errors: Crawl errors are failures that happen when a search engine tries to fetch a URL, such as server errors, redirect problems, blocked pages or DNS failures.
- Googlebot: Googlebot is the web crawler Google uses to fetch pages for Search. It discovers URLs, downloads them and passes them on to be rendered and indexed.
