The 20-Point SEO Audit Checklist We Run Before Any Campaign

Content written on a broken foundation is money spent on a leaking roof. Before any keyword strategy, we run a 20-point technical and content audit. It takes our team about two days; it takes most sites about an hour to fail the first ten points. Here is the checklist, in the order we run it.

A. Crawlability & indexation (points 1–6)

• 1. robots.txt — is anything important disallowed by accident?
• 2. XML sitemap — present, fresh, and submitted in Search Console?
• 3. Indexability — are money pages secretly 'noindex' or canonical-tagged elsewhere?
• 4. Redirect chains — anything losing link equity through 2–3 hops?
• 5. 404s & soft-404s — dead URLs still earning links or internal clicks?
• 6. HTTP → HTTPS — every variant redirecting cleanly to one canonical host?

B. On-page fundamentals (points 7–12)

• 7. Titles — unique per page, keyword near the front, no template duplication
• 8. Meta descriptions — written to earn the click, not stuffed
• 9. H1 structure — one per page, describing what the page actually sells
• 10. Internal links — money pages receive links from relevant pages, not orphaned
• 11. Image alt text — descriptive where it matters, invisible where it doesn't
• 12. Duplicate content — thin near-duplicates cannibalising each other's rankings

C. Speed & experience (points 13–16)

• 13. Core Web Vitals — LCP under 2.5s on mobile, not just on your laptop
• 14. Image weight — hero images compressed and sized for their slots
• 15. Mobile layout — tap targets, readable font sizes, no horizontal scroll
• 16. Cumulative layout shift — nothing jumps while the user is about to click

D. Local & trust (points 17–20)

• 17. Google Business Profile — categories, hours, photos, and recent posts
• 18. NAP consistency — name, address, phone identical across directories
• 19. Structured data — Organization, Service and FAQ schema that Google can parse
• 20. Conversion tracking — analytics actually measuring form fills and calls

How to read the results

Score below 15/20 and content spend is premature — fix the floor first, because every article you publish inherits these problems. Score 15–18 and you can rank for local and mid-competition terms while patching. Score 18+ and the ceiling is your content velocity, not your plumbing. Either way, the audit costs you an hour and saves you months.

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