The 10-Point SEO Audit We Run on Every New Client Before Touching a Single Page

Most SEO audits start with a crawler report and end with a spreadsheet nobody reads. Ours doesn't, because it's built to answer one question before we touch a single page: what is actually stopping this site from ranking? Here is the exact 10-point sequence, in order, that we run on every new client engagement.

1. Crawl budget and indexation check

We start with Google Search Console's coverage report, not a third-party crawler. If Google has excluded pages you care about, no amount of new content will fix that until the exclusion reason is resolved — duplicate content, soft 404s, and orphaned pages are the usual culprits.

2. Core Web Vitals on real devices

Lab data from PageSpeed Insights is a starting point, not the answer. We pull field data (CrUX) for the actual URLs ranking, because a fast homepage means nothing if your money pages fail LCP on mid-range Android devices — which is where most of our clients' traffic actually comes from.

3. Cannibalization mapping

We export every ranking keyword and group pages that compete against each other. This single step has recovered more lost traffic for our clients than any new content we've written — consolidating three competing pages into one authoritative page is often a bigger win than publishing five new ones.

4. Content decay audit

Pages don't rank forever. We flag anything that lost more than 20% of its traffic year-over-year and diagnose whether it's a freshness problem, a SERP feature takeover, or a competitor that simply built a better page.

5. Internal link equity distribution

Using a crawl combined with GSC data, we map which pages receive the most internal links versus which pages actually convert. Misalignment here is common — and cheap to fix.

6. Backlink profile risk scan

Not for "toxic link" panic — for pattern recognition. We look at anchor text distribution and referring domain growth rate to spot unnatural patterns before Google does.

7. Schema markup validation

We check what's implemented against what's eligible. Product, FAQ, Article, and Organization schema are the most commonly missing or malformed on the sites we onboard.

8. Competitor content gap analysis

We compare the top five ranking pages for target queries against the client's existing content, subtopic by subtopic, to find exactly what's missing rather than guessing at "more content."

9. Mobile usability spot-check

Manual testing on three real device sizes, not just Chrome DevTools emulation. Tap targets, interstitials, and viewport issues get caught here that automated tools miss.

10. Conversion path review

SEO traffic that doesn't convert is a vanity metric. We trace the path from top-ranking pages to the nearest conversion point and flag any page that's driving traffic into a dead end.

What happens after the audit

Every finding gets prioritized by effort versus impact, not by audit-tool severity score. That prioritized list becomes the first 90 days of the engagement — no filler tasks, no busywork.

Want this audit run on your own site? Book a free consultation and we'll walk through the findings live.