What an SEO Audit Actually Covers

An SEO audit is the most-sold and least-explained product in the industry. This note walks through what a proper one covers, section by section, so you can tell a real audit from a template with your logo pasted in.

Crawling and accessibility

The first question is blunt: can search engines reach your pages at all?

• Robots directives and meta robots tags that accidentally block folders
• Redirect chains and loops that waste crawling budget
• Broken links, internal and external
• XML sitemap accuracy: does it list real, working URLs?
• Duplicate versions of the same page: trailing slashes, parameters, uppercase letters

A site can look perfect in a browser and still be half-invisible to a crawler. This section finds that.

Indexation

Reachable is not the same as indexed. The audit compares what exists with what Google actually keeps in its index.

• Coverage reports in Google Search Console: indexed, discovered but not crawled, excluded
• Canonical tags pointing to the wrong page
• Thin or duplicate pages diluting attention across URLs
• Pages indexed under both www and non-www, or http and https

Technical quality

• Page speed: Core Web Vitals from real visitor data, not a lab score
• Mobile behaviour, since most UK search traffic is mobile
• HTTPS: certificates, mixed content, redirect discipline
• Structured data that parses and matches what is on the page

Content and intent

The human half of the audit. For each page that matters:

• Does it answer a real search, or does it merely exist?
• Titles and descriptions written for the result page, not for the CMS default
• Heading structure that reflects the page’s actual subject
• Cannibalisation: five pages competing for one search instead of one strong page

Links

• Internal linking: are important pages reachable in a few clicks from the homepage?
• Orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them
• Anchor text that describes the destination
• Outbound links that are honest and working

External link profiles belong in a separate piece of work. They are cited in an audit when relevant, but the fixes that pay off fastest are almost always internal.

Measurement

• Google Search Console verified for the whole domain
• Google Analytics 4 receiving data
• Conversions defined, so improvement can be judged in enquiries rather than visits

What a good audit report looks like

Findings ranked by impact, not by tool order

An audit that lists 300 unchecked boxes is a crawl dump. A real audit names the handful of things worth fixing first, and why, with evidence.

A plain-English explanation next to every technical term

If the report cannot explain the problem to the person paying for it, the problem will not get fixed, because nobody will authorise the work.

Every finding tied to a fix

A finding without a recommended action is trivia. The audit should read as a plan.

The free version

CoreLane SEO offers a free mini-audit covering the headlines: crawlability, indexation, page speed, titles and descriptions, and a count of the issues that matter most. It takes about a day and there is no obligation. The full audit, the itemised version with every finding ranked and explained, is month one of the monthly programme.

An audit is worth exactly what its explanations are worth. The crawling is mechanical; the judgement about what matters is the product.