Free guides based on Google's own documentation. No secrets, no hacks, no over-promises. Just what actually matters for search.
The guide explains the why. The checklist is the thing you work through. The report article shows what a client actually receives. They are written to be read in that order, but you can start anywhere.
Open the checklist and work from the top. Items 1-6 either block indexing or break the whole site, so they come first.
Read the audit guide first. It follows crawling, indexing, and serving in the order Google's own documentation uses.
Read the report article. It covers the score, the executive summary, and why issues are grouped by severity instead of listed one by one.
What an SEO audit is, why it matters, and how to run one. From crawlability to on-page factors to technical health.
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A practical, step-by-step checklist covering every on-page and technical factor you should audit. Bookmark it.
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A complete walkthrough of every on-page factor: title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, images, structured data, and more.
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How to use SEO by Daniel: add your domain, read your reports, understand your score, and fix issues found.
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Picking a tool before you start? We publish honest comparisons that say where each competitor wins: Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Semrush. See all comparisons.
A practical, step-by-step SEO audit checklist for freelancers and agencies. Every on-page and technical factor worth checking, based on Google Search Central documentation.
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SEO auditsAn SEO audit report turns a crawl into a 0-100 score, an executive summary, and a prioritized list of issues. Here's exactly what's inside, with a live example.
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These guides are educational. They cite Google Search Central documentation and industry research. Following these practices may create better conditions for ranking in search results, but search rankings depend on hundreds of factors including domain authority, competition, and Google's algorithms. There are no secrets here that will automatically rank your site first. That's Google's own framing from their SEO Starter Guide - and we stand by it.
This is the order I run on a client site I have not seen before. On a site under 100 pages it takes about an hour, most of which is reading rather than waiting on the crawl.
No. robots.txt, sitemap.xml, page titles, and redirects can all be checked with a browser and a crawler. Paid tools save time on large sites. They do not change what a good audit looks at.
The checklist is the list of checks. The guide explains why each one exists and how to read the result. Use the checklist while you work, the guide when you need the reasoning.
Every indexable URL if the sitemap is accurate. On a site with thousands of pages, group by template and audit one representative URL from each group first, then crawl everything once the templates are fixed.
Get permission first. An audit sends automated requests to someone else's server, and our Terms of Service only allow scanning domains you own or have permission to scan.
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