Your first SEO audit: five checks before you touch anything

Sooner or later someone will say to you: “Our website doesn’t show up on Google. Can you look at the SEO?” It’s an exciting request and a slightly scary one. SEO tools will happily hand you a report with 300 “issues”, and it’s tempting to start fixing from the top.

Don’t. Most of those issues won’t matter. Your first job is diagnosis: working out which of three problems the site really has. This guide gives you five checks, in order, that get you there with free tools.

The three kinds of SEO problem

Think of ranking on Google like getting a book into a library and onto readers’ recommendation lists:

• Technical: can the librarian find the book and put it on a shelf? (Can Google crawl and index your pages?)
• Content: is it the book people are actually asking for? (Do your pages answer what people search?)
• Authority: do other trusted people recommend it? (Do other sites link to and mention you?)

A site usually has one main problem. Fixing the wrong one is how teams spend six months on SEO with nothing to show for it.

Check 1: Is the site in Google at all?

Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. You’ll see a rough list of pages Google has indexed.

• Far fewer pages than the site has? Likely a technical problem. Go to check 2.
• Roughly the right number? Indexing is probably fine. Move on.

Then open Google Search Console (free; ask whoever manages the website for access). The Pages report shows which pages are indexed and, more usefully, why others aren’t.

▸ Definition — Indexing: Google storing a page in its database so it can appear in results. A page that isn’t indexed can’t rank, however good it is.

Check 2: Is anything blocking Google?

Look for the three most common accidental blocks:

1. A robots.txt file (at yourdomain.com/robots.txt) that says Disallow: /, which tells search engines to stay away from the whole site. This often happens when a site moves from a test version to the live one.
2. A noindex tag on important pages. Search Console’s URL Inspection tool will tell you if a page carries one.
3. Pages that only load after a login or a lot of scripts, so Google sees an empty page.

If you find one of these, you’ve probably found the main problem, and the fix is often quick.

Check 3: What is the site already ranking for?

In Search Console, open the Performance report and look at the queries tab for the last three months. This shows the searches where you already appear, how often, and your average position.

You’re looking for two things:

• Near misses: queries where you sit in positions 5–20. These pages are close; improving them is usually faster than creating new ones.
• Mismatches: queries you rank for that don’t fit your business (a lighting shop ranking for “photography lighting tips”), or important products with no queries at all.

▸ Example — A near miss. A furniture shop’s “solid wood dining tables” page averages position 11. It has 60 words of copy and no answers to the obvious questions: sizes, wood types, care, delivery. Expanding the page to answer those is a better first project than writing ten new blog posts. Illustrative.

Check 4: Do your key pages match what people search?

Pick the five pages that matter most to the business. For each, search Google for the main phrase you want it to rank for and look at what currently ranks on page one.

Ask yourself:

• Are the top results the same type of page as yours? If Google shows buying guides and you have a product page (or the reverse), you’re competing in the wrong format.
• Do they answer more questions than your page does?
• Does your page’s title clearly contain the phrase people search?

This is the content check, and it’s where most small and medium sites have the most room to improve.

Check 5: Does anyone link to you?

Authority is mostly built from links and mentions from other reputable sites. Free tools give a partial picture: Search Console’s Links report shows which sites link to you most.

• Very few links, and competitors have many? Authority is likely holding you back, especially for competitive phrases.
• A reasonable spread of genuine links? Authority probably isn’t your main problem. Focus on content.

▸ Margin note — Never buy links. Besides breaking Google’s guidelines, it teaches you nothing about earning attention, which is the real skill.

Putting it together

What you found	Main problem	First project
Pages missing from the index, or a block in checks 1–2	Technical	Fix indexing before anything else
Indexed, but key pages don’t match search intent	Content	Rebuild or expand five key pages
Good content, still outranked by stronger sites	Authority	Create things worth linking to; do PR and partnerships

Write this up in one page: what you checked, what you found and the single project you recommend first. That’s an SEO audit a manager can act on. It’s far more useful than a 300-issue export.

Take it to work