What is an SEO audit and why it matters
An SEO audit is a review of the technical health of your site from a search engine's point of view: what it can read, what it finds broken and what stops it understanding your pages.
It is not marketing or keywords; it is the layer underneath, the plumbing that decides whether everything else even gets a chance to work. And it rarely announces itself: the site looks fine while it quietly loses visits.
What an audit looks at
A crawler walks your site following links, just as Google does, noting what it sees. Out of that come the questions that matter:
- Can it be crawled? A too-strict robots.txt or a noindex tag left on by accident can hide whole pages from the engine.
- Are there broken links? Links that lead to a 404 waste visits and cut the crawler's path.
- Are titles and descriptions there? Empty, duplicated or too long, they hurt how you show up in the results.
- Do images have alt text? Without it, neither a search engine nor a screen reader knows what they show.
- Does the heading structure make sense? One H1 per page and a tidy hierarchy help an engine understand what it is about.
- Does the page perform? A slow page loses visits before it loads and is penalised on mobile.
An audit does not tell you what to write: it tells you what is stopping what you already wrote from reaching anyone.
Why it matters
Because a technical problem does not announce itself. You can write the best content in the world, but if the page is set to noindex, nobody will find it; if the title is empty, Google makes one up; if it loads in eight seconds, half your visitors leave before they see it.
These are silent faults: the site appears to work, and yet you lose visits every day without knowing.
How often to do it
A full review a couple of times a year, and a quick one every time you make a big change: a redesign, a migration, moving platform. Those are exactly the moments when things break unnoticed until traffic drops weeks later.
Start without the fuss
You do not need to hire anyone to get a first picture. With Screaming Cow you can analyse a page for free with no sign-up: enter the address, it gets crawled, and we hand back, in plain language, what we found and what is worth fixing first.
These look at one page
An audit crawls the whole site and reports what is wrong across every page it finds.
Audit a site