This SEO audit checklist follows the 20 steps in Semrush’s guide, how to perform a complete SEO audit, grouped into five phases so you can run it in sittings rather than in one exhausting pass. It is the whole-site audit. If you only need the crawling, indexing and speed layer, our technical SEO checklist goes deeper on that part alone.
The point worth stating before the list: an audit is a diagnosis, not a deliverable. The measure of a good one is how short and specific the fix list is at the end.
The 20 steps, grouped into phases
| Phase | Steps | Go deeper |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Technical health | Crawler access; architecture and crawl depth; duplicate site versions; technical errors; structured data | Technical SEO checklist |
| 2. Mobile and performance | Mobile-friendliness; speed; Core Web Vitals | Core Web Vitals assessment failed |
| 3. Traffic and competitors | Organic traffic; competitor benchmarks; missing keywords and prompts | Search Console vs Google Analytics |
| 4. Content | Duplicate content and cannibalisation; on-page SEO; content quality | Keyword cannibalisation, content pruning |
| 5. Visibility and links | AI visibility (three steps); brand mentions and backlinks; backlink gaps; SERP-feature presence | Ranking in ChatGPT, link reclamation, SERP features |
The grouping is ours; the steps are Semrush’s. The order matters because each phase can change what the next one finds. A section blocked from crawling will look like a content problem if you audit content first.
Phases 1 and 2: can search engines reach and load the site?
Start by confirming crawlers can get in. Check robots.txt, meta robots tags and that only one version of the site resolves: HTTP and HTTPS, with and without www, should all end at a single address. Then crawl the site and look at depth. Pages that sit many clicks from the homepage get crawled less and usually rank worse.
Technical errors and structured data close out the first phase. Broken links, redirect chains and server errors are mechanical fixes; invalid markup is usually a template problem fixed once. While you are here, compare the URLs in your sitemap with the pages Search Console reports as indexed. The difference between those two lists often points straight at a template, a parameter or a section that something is quietly excluding.
Phase two is mobile and speed. Semrush notes that “more than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices,” which is why mobile-friendliness and Core Web Vitals sit near the top of its list. Audit by template rather than by URL: one slow template explains most failing pages.
Phase 3: traffic, competitors and the gaps between them
Now look at results. Pull organic traffic over at least a year so you can see seasonality and any drop that lines up with an algorithm update. Use Search Console for queries and clicks, and your analytics tool for what visitors did after they arrived. The two measure different things and will not match, which is expected.
Break traffic down by section and by page type before drawing conclusions. A site-wide decline is often one section falling hard while the rest holds steady, and the fix for that section has nothing to do with the rest of the site. Averages hide exactly the pattern an audit is meant to find.
Then benchmark against the sites that actually outrank you, not the brands you assume are your competitors. Semrush’s step on missing keywords now includes prompts as well as keywords, reflecting how people ask AI assistants. The output of this phase is a list of topics competitors cover and you do not.
Phase 4: content quality and on-page SEO
This is where the received wisdom fails most often. The standard audit flags every page with a short title or a missing meta description and calls it a finding. Those are cosmetic. The content phase that matters asks harder questions: which pages compete with each other for the same query, which pages earn nothing and should be merged or removed, and which pages answer their query worse than the result above them.
Cannibalisation is the quickest win here. Two pages splitting one query often rank worse together than one consolidated page would alone. Pruning is the second: thin pages with no traffic and no links dilute a site’s topical focus. On-page fixes, such as titles, headings and internal links, come after you have decided which pages should exist.
Phase 5: AI visibility, links and SERP features
Semrush gives AI visibility three of its 20 steps, which tells you how much the audit has changed. The practical checks: is your brand mentioned when people ask AI assistants about your topic, which sources do those answers cite, and are your pages among them. Treat this as a new channel to measure, not a replacement for search rankings.
Be careful with the numbers in this phase. AI answers vary between sessions, phrasings and tools, so a single check proves little. Run the same set of prompts on a schedule and watch the direction of travel, rather than reporting one snapshot as a score.
Links come next. Review brand mentions and backlinks together, because an unlinked mention is often the easiest link you will ever get. Then compare your referring domains with competitors’ to find gaps. Finish with SERP features: which features appear for your main queries, and which ones you hold.
Turning an SEO audit checklist into a fix list
The limitation of any SEO audit checklist, this one included, is that it finds problems without ranking them. Twenty steps will surface far more issues than you can fix, and most audit tools score them by count, not by impact. A hundred missing alt attributes look worse on a report than one robots.txt line blocking your best section, yet the second is the one costing traffic.
An audit also captures a single moment. Rankings, competitors and AI answers keep moving after you finish, so a report from six months ago describes a site that no longer quite exists. Date every finding, and re-check the important ones before you act on them.
So end each phase with a triage. Sort findings into three groups: blocks traffic now, limits growth, and cosmetic. Fix the first group before moving to the next phase, schedule the second, and ignore most of the third. For beginners running a first audit, that discipline matters more than completing every step. More planning guides sit in the strategy archive.
Frequently asked questions
What should an SEO audit checklist include?
Technical health, mobile and performance, traffic and competitor benchmarks, content quality and on-page SEO, and visibility across AI answers, backlinks and SERP features.
How is an SEO audit different from a technical SEO audit?
A technical audit covers crawling, indexing, speed and markup. A full SEO audit adds content, competitors, links and visibility on top of that technical layer.
How often should I run a full SEO audit?
A full audit once or twice a year suits most sites, with lighter monthly checks on crawling, indexing and traffic in between.
Where should a beginner start?
Start with crawler access and indexing. If search engines cannot reach a page, nothing else in the audit will help it rank.
The takeaway Run the 20 steps in five phases, in order, and triage after each one. A short fix list ranked by impact is worth more than a complete report.
