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SEO audit

An SEO audit is a review of a site for technical and content problems that hold back its unpaid Google traffic, with an estimate of what each fix would bring.

How it works

An audit looks for whatever keeps pages out of organic search or pushes them down the results. Technical problems stop Google from crawling, indexing or serving pages: a server that is down, a robots.txt file Google can’t fetch, “page not found” errors, a misplaced noindex rule. The audit also checks security issues and manual actions for spam. The data comes from Search Console, web analytics and a crawler that walks the site the way a search robot does.

Google’s advice on hiring an SEO specialist sets the bar: an audit should give realistic estimates of improvement and of the work involved, and nobody can guarantee a #1 ranking. Google also advises giving the auditor only read access to Search Console. For a store, the useful order is by money: pages that bring organic revenue first, the rest later. Our ecommerce SEO audit checklist follows that order.

Example

Example store, not client data.

The tableware shop earns 50,000 a month from organic search, according to GA4 revenue by landing page. A crawler reports 1,200 warnings. Of these, 1,100 flag missing image alt text on product pages that bring 1,000 of that revenue, or 2%.

Six others flag a noindex rule that a template update added to six top category pages. Last month those pages brought 15,000: 15,000 ÷ 50,000 = 30% of organic revenue. Those six go first.

Not to be confused with

  • Account audit — a review of the Google Ads account: tracking, structure, products, bids. It covers paid traffic; an SEO audit covers the unpaid results.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “The SEO tool scores the site 95 out of 100, so organic search is fine.” Right: Google says third-party SEO tools have no access to its ranking data. The score reflects only the tool’s own checks.
  • Wrong: “1,200 warnings, so work down the list from the top.” Right: in the example, six warnings cover pages with 30% of organic revenue, and 1,100 cover pages with 2%. Rank the fixes by money, not by the number of warnings.

Sources

  • Do you need an SEO? (Google Search Central) — what an audit should give, read access to Search Console, third-party tools, no guaranteed ranking. Checked 2 October 2026.
  • Debugging drops in Google Search traffic (Google Search Central) — technical, security and spam causes of lost traffic. Checked 2 October 2026.