Site Audit: Your website's full health check
Think of a site audit as a medical exam for your website: a systematic check of technical systems, on-page content, and backlinks to find what’s hurting rankings and conversions — then turn those findings into a prioritized plan to fix them. A quick domain valuation (for example, the Domain Name Value Estimator) can help frame the business impact before you dive in.
Main points
1. Technical SEO: make your site findable
- Run a full site crawl (Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush) to spot blocked pages, duplicates, and orphan pages.
- Check robots.txt first — one misplaced rule can hide your entire site.
- Keep your XML sitemap clean: remove 404s, old redirects, and low-value URLs so crawlers focus on your important pages.
- Fix errors and redirects: resolve 404s, replace redirect chains with direct 301s, and prioritize fixes that recover crawl budget and link equity.
- Ensure HTTPS sitewide — it’s a trust signal and lightweight ranking factor.
2. On-page content and structure: match user intent
- Audit title tags, meta descriptions, and headers: remove duplicates, fix truncation, and ensure target keywords appear naturally.
- Enforce clear header hierarchy (one H1 per page, meaningful H2/H3s).
- Classify pages into three buckets:
- Update — pages with potential needing depth or freshness
- Consolidate — merge thin, overlapping pages into authoritative resources
- Remove — prune or noindex low-value pages
- Fix orphan pages by adding contextual internal links with descriptive anchor text to distribute authority and aid navigation.
3. Backlink profile: separate helpful links from harmful ones
- Inventory backlinks from Ahrefs or Semrush and sort by authority, relevance, and anchor text.
- Identify toxic links and prepare a disavow file if necessary — use Google Search Console carefully.
- Study competitors’ backlinks to uncover outreach targets and partnership opportunities.
4. UX, performance, and Core Web Vitals
- Measure Core Web Vitals: LCP (main content load speed), FID (input responsiveness), and CLS (visual stability).
- Use PageSpeed Insights to find slow scripts, large images, and render-blocking resources.
- Test mobile usability: navigation, tap targets, and readable fonts matter for conversions.
- Simplify site architecture: aim to reach key content within three clicks from the homepage; use breadcrumbs and clearer navigation to surface buried pages.
5. Turn findings into prioritized work
- Group issues by category (technical, content, UX, backlinks) and score by impact vs. effort:
- Quick wins = high impact, low effort
- Projects = high impact, high effort
- Deprioritize low impact, high effort items
- Benchmark before changes (traffic, rankings, conversions, Core Web Vitals) so you can measure ROI.
6. Tools and cadence
- Run a full audit at least annually, with quarterly health checks and after major site updates or algorithm shifts.
- Typical tools: Ahrefs, Semrush, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights.
Quick starter checklist
- Crawl site and check robots.txt
- Fix indexing and HTTPS issues
- Clean up sitemap
- Audit titles, metas, and headers
- Update, consolidate, or remove content as needed
- Inventory backlinks and flag toxic domains
- Measure Core Web Vitals and address the biggest slowdowns
- Build a prioritized action plan and record benchmarks
Conclusion
A focused site audit turns data into action: fix technical blockers first, then improve content and UX, and finally strengthen off-page authority. Prioritize by impact and effort, measure results, and iterate.
Think you could fix your site’s single biggest blocker in 24 hours? Take the challenge and get the step-by-step playbook: https://microestimates.com/blog/how-to-do-a-site-audit
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