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SEO audit: do it yourself in 8 steps, or in 5 minutes with AI
An SEO audit is a check of your website on everything that affects your visibility in Google: can Google read your pages, are your titles right, do your pages link to each other and do you answer your customers’ questions? You can do it yourself with free tools. That takes half a day. You can also let software do it. Then you have the outcome in a few minutes.
The team behind GreatCompany also runs a marketing agency, so we know the audits agencies make. Many audits end up in a drawer. A forty-page report with 140 points is impressive, but nobody carries it out. That is why this article starts at the end: what you do with the outcome. The steps come after.
What should an SEO audit deliver?
A good audit ends with a short list. Five to ten points, in order of impact, with exactly what to do for each.
Not: “Improve the meta descriptions.” But: “The page /kitchen-remodel gets 1,200 impressions a month at position 7 and has no description. Write one.”
Get an audit from an agency without such an order? Ask for it. A list without priority leaves the thinking to you.
The 8 steps if you do it yourself
You need: Google Search Console (free), a spreadsheet and about four hours. For step 3 the free version of Screaming Frog is handy. It fetches up to 500 pages of your site.
1. Is everything in Google?
Open Search Console and go to Pages. You see how many pages are indexed and how many are not. Click the reasons. If a page you want in Google is listed under noindex, that is a mistake. If it is under crawled but not indexed, Google saw the page and did not include it. Often the page is too thin.
Is your site not in Google at all? Start with getting your website found on Google.
2. Is there one version of your site?
Type your address with and without www, and with http and https. All four should end up at the same address.
3. Titles and descriptions
Put all your pages in a spreadsheet with the title and description next to them. Look for:
- pages without a description
- titles longer than 60 characters, which Google truncates
- titles that are the same on several pages
- titles that say nothing, such as “Home” or “Services”
Take a kitchen showroom in Indianapolis with 44 pages. Of those, 29 have no description, and six pages are all called “Kitchens | Business Name”. That is a normal picture for a small business site.
4. Headings on the page
Every page has one main heading, the H1. It says what the page is about. Below it are subheadings. Check that the H1 is there, that there is only one and that it says something other than “Welcome”.
5. Internal links
Find the pages no other page links to. Those are called orphan pages. Google finds them hard to discover and takes them less seriously. Also check whether your most important pages can be reached from your homepage. More in internal links.
6. Images
Do your images have alt text? That is the description Google and screen readers read. And are they not too heavy? A 4 MB photo makes your page slow on a phone. See alt text.
7. Speed on mobile
Test your three most important pages on pagespeed.web.dev, on the Mobile tab. You do not need 100. You want to know whether something makes the page seconds slower.
8. Content against search queries
This step pays off most and is skipped most often. Want to know what your competitors do differently as well? Read SEO competitor analysis. Open the Performance report in Search Console. Sort by impressions. Look at queries where you rank at position 5 to 20.
For each query: do I have a page that really answers it? Is the answer at the top? The kitchen showroom is shown 380 times a month for “kitchen remodel cost” and has no page for it. Google then shows the homepage, at position 16.
What an audit by AI does differently
Steps 1 through 7 are counting work. Software does it faster and forgets nothing. No discussion there.
The interesting part is step 8. Until recently, only a person could read a page and say: this text does not answer the question. A language model can now do that too. It reads the page, puts it next to the queries from Search Console and says what is missing.
| Yourself, by hand | Agency | Software with AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Half a day | One to two weeks | Minutes |
| Cost | Your own hours | $500 to $3,000 | Often free or in a subscription |
| Technical points | Good, with patience | Good | Good |
| Judging content | Good, you know your trade | Good | Fair to good |
| Strategy | Your own insight | Strong | No |
| Repeating | Rarely | Pay each time | Every week by itself |
That last row is the real difference. An audit shows where your site stands today. Your site changes, and so do your competitors. A scan that runs again every week notices when a new page has no description.
What software does not do: tell you that you put the wrong service first, or that your audience searches differently than you think. That is strategy. Use your own head for that, or a good advisor.
A technical scan and a content audit are not the same thing
Many free “SEO checks” online are just a technical scan of one page. You enter your address and get a score. That score says little. A page can score 95 technically and still be about nothing.
An audit that pays off looks at your whole site and at your numbers. Which pages does Google already show? Where do people not click? Which question do you not answer?
Next to Google, there is now another question: can an AI assistant read your site? ChatGPT and Perplexity do not execute JavaScript. A site that only loads its text after a script is empty to them. You test that with the technical AI scan.
From audit to action: the five-a-week rule
You have your list. Now what?
Do not start at the top and work through everything. Choose five points. Carry them out. Wait four weeks and see what they did.
Why five? Because otherwise you cannot measure. Change everything in one weekend and you will not know which change helped. And because five is doable. A list of 140 points feels like a remodel. Improving five titles is an hour of work.
The order we recommend:
- Pages that are not in Google and should be
- Pages at position 5 to 15 with a weak title
- Frequently shown pages without a description
- Queries you have no page for
- The rest
Do not want to keep up this rhythm yourself? Software can take it over. That is no longer an audit but ongoing maintenance. How that works is in automating SEO with AI. Prefer to do it yourself? Read the step-by-step plan for DIY SEO.
When do you have a person do the audit?
In three cases we would spend money on it.
Before a new website or a migration. A mistake in the redirects can cost you your rankings in a day. Have a specialist look before the new site goes live.
After a sudden drop. Lose half your visitors in a week and you want someone who works out whether it is your site or a change at Google.
For a large online store. Thousands of products, filters and categories create problems a standard scan does not weigh well.
Read what SEO costs per month, including with a specialist. Which tools run the scan for you is compared in AI SEO tools.
Audit your own site in a few minutes
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Frequently asked questions
- What is an SEO audit?
- An SEO audit is a check of your website on everything that affects your visibility in Google. You check whether Google can read your pages, whether your titles and descriptions are right, whether pages link to each other and whether the content answers what people search for. The outcome is a list of points, in order of what pays off most.
- What does an SEO audit cost?
- At an agency or freelancer, an audit for a small business site usually costs between $500 and $3,000, depending on the size of the site and how deep it goes. Doing it yourself with free tools costs only your time, about half a day. An audit by software is often free or included in a subscription.
- How often should you do an SEO audit?
- A full audit once a year, and after every major change such as a redesign or migration. The parts that keep changing, such as titles, descriptions and internal links, are better checked every week or month. Software does that continuously.
- Can AI do an SEO audit?
- Yes, and well. A scan fetches all your pages and finds in minutes what a person finds in a day: empty descriptions, titles that are too long, pages without links, missing alt text. AI adds that it reads the content and says which question a page does not answer. What your business should sell, AI does not decide.
- What do you do with the outcome of an SEO audit?
- Choose the five points that pay off most and start there. Those are almost always pages Google already shows but few people click. An audit with 140 points that ends up in a drawer delivers nothing. Five improvements a week do more than one big list.
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