SEO Audit Checklist: 15 Checks You Can Do Today

Why run an SEO audit?

An SEO audit finds the technical and on-page problems that quietly hold your site back, before they cost you rankings. Most sites lose positions not to a competitor's brilliance but to broken links, missing titles or pages Google cannot index. This checklist covers the 15 checks that catch the majority of those issues. You can do them by hand, or let a tool run all of them at once.

The 15-point checklist

• 1. Title tags. Every page has a unique, descriptive title of roughly 50 to 60 characters.
• 2. Meta descriptions. Unique, compelling, 150 to 160 characters, no duplicates across pages.
• 3. One H1 per page. A single, clear H1 that matches the page intent, with logical H2 and H3 structure below it.
• 4. Indexability. No important page is accidentally blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag.
• 5. XML sitemap. A valid sitemap exists, is submitted in Search Console and lists your real URLs.
• 6. Broken links. No 4xx or 5xx links, internal or outbound, that send users and crawlers to dead ends.
• 7. Redirect chains. Redirects go straight to the destination, no long chains or loops, and HTTP goes to HTTPS.
• 8. Core Web Vitals. LCP, INP and CLS are in the green on mobile and desktop.
• 9. Mobile-friendly. The site is responsive and readable on a phone, Google indexes mobile first.
• 10. HTTPS. The whole site is secure, with no mixed content loading over http.
• 11. Canonical tags. Correct canonicals prevent duplicate-content confusion.
• 12. Structured data. Article, FAQ, Product or Organization schema where relevant, valid and error-free.
• 13. Image optimization. Descriptive alt text, modern formats (WebP or AVIF) and sensible file sizes.
• 14. Internal linking. Important pages are linked from other relevant pages, not orphaned.
• 15. AI crawler access. GPTBot, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot and others are allowed, so you can be cited in AI answers (GEO).

Common mistakes

• Fixing symptoms, not causes. A dropped ranking is often a technical issue, not a content one.
• Auditing once and never again. Sites drift: new pages break rules, links rot, speed regresses.
• Ignoring AI crawlers. Blocking them quietly removes you from AI search.

Do it automatically

Running 15 checks by hand across a whole site is slow, and it goes stale the moment you finish. The dGENIX SEO Engine runs all of this as a real multi-page crawl (100+ checks), reruns on a schedule, and writes paste-ready fixes for the issues it finds. GENI can send you an alert the day a ranking drops. Learn the full workflow in AI SEO in 2026.

Get a free audit of your site in a minute, or create a free account.