What Should Be in a Website Audit? A Complete Checklist

A proper website audit should check seven things: technical SEO, on-page SEO, content quality, local SEO signals, AI visibility (AEO), conversion and UX elements, and how you stack up against real competitors. Skip any one of those and you're not auditing the site, you're just glancing at it.

Most "free audits" you'll find online check one or two of these and call it done. Here's what actually belongs in a thorough one, and why each piece matters.

Technical SEO

This is the foundation. If it's broken, nothing else matters, because search engines and AI crawlers can't properly read or rank a site they can't access.

• Crawlability - can search engines actually reach and read your pages, or are you blocking them by accident with a bad robots.txt file or noindex tag
• Site speed - how long pages take to load, especially on mobile connections, since slow sites lose both rankings and visitors
• Mobile-friendliness - whether the site actually works on a phone, not just whether it "has a mobile version"
• Indexing issues - pages that should be in Google's index but aren't, broken redirects, duplicate content fighting itself for rankings
• HTTPS and security basics - a valid SSL certificate and no mixed-content warnings

A technical problem here can quietly cap everything else you do. You can write the best content in your industry, but if the page takes eight seconds to load on a phone, most people never see it.

On-page SEO

This is the layer people usually mean when they say "SEO." It's about whether each page is set up to tell search engines what it's actually about.

• Title tags - unique, descriptive, and actually containing the terms people search for
• Meta descriptions - not duplicated across pages, not missing, written to earn the click
• Header structure - a real H1, logical H2s and H3s underneath, not a wall of bolded paragraphs
• Keyword targeting - does each page target something people actually search for, or is it written for an internal audience instead of customers
• Image alt text - present, descriptive, not stuffed with keywords

None of this is about tricking anyone. It's about making the structure of a page match what it's actually about, so both search engines and AI tools can summarize it correctly.

Content quality

Technical and on-page fixes get you found. Content quality determines what happens after that. A page can be perfectly optimized and still fail to convince anyone of anything.

• Does the page actually answer the question someone typed in to get there
• Is it written for a real customer, or does it read like it was written for a boss who needed a page filled
• Are claims specific, or vague enough to apply to any competitor's business too
• Is there enough depth to be useful, without padding for the sake of a word count

Thin, generic content is one of the most common findings in audits like this. Pages exist, they're technically fine, and they say almost nothing a competitor's page doesn't also say.

Local SEO signals

If the business serves a specific city or region, this category can matter more than anything above it.

• NAP consistency - name, address, and phone number matching exactly across the website, Google Business Profile, and directory listings
• Google Business Profile - claimed, verified, filled out completely, with accurate categories and hours
• Local keyword presence - whether city and service-area terms show up naturally on the site, not just in the footer
• Reviews - volume, recency, and whether anyone from the business is responding

A mismatched phone number between your website and your Google listing sounds small. It's one of the more common reasons a legitimate local business doesn't show up in the map pack.

AI visibility and AEO signals

This is the newest category, and the one most existing "audit" tools completely skip. More buying research now starts in an AI chat window instead of a search results page, and being findable there runs on different rules.

• Structured data - schema markup that tells AI systems concretely what the business is, what it offers, and where it operates
• Answer-shaped content - pages that directly answer specific questions in plain language, not just pages optimized for keyword density
• AI crawler access - whether your robots.txt is quietly blocking the bots that AI tools use to read and cite websites
• Clarity of core facts - can an AI model easily extract what you do, where you're located, and how someone contacts you

You can rank fine in traditional search and still be invisible to AI-driven answers if these are wrong. It's a separate check, not a variation on regular SEO. For more on how this category fits into a full evaluation, see what makes an audit independent.

Conversion and UX elements

A site can pass every check above and still fail to turn visitors into customers. This category asks a simpler question: if someone lands here ready to buy, can they?

• Clear calls to action - obvious next steps on every important page, not buried at the bottom
• Contact information - a phone number and address that are easy to find, not hidden behind a "Contact" click three menus deep
• Working forms - tested, not assumed. Forms that silently fail are more common than you'd think
• Trust signals - reviews, credentials, and proof points visible where a decision actually gets made
• Page load and navigation on mobile - since most visits now happen on a phone, not a desktop

This is where a lot of otherwise decent websites lose the most ground. The traffic shows up. The site just doesn't ask for the business.

Competitor benchmarking

Every category above means more with context. A load time of three seconds sounds fine until you learn your top three competitors load in under one. A "good enough" Google Business Profile looks different next to a competitor with twice the reviews and a faster response rate.

A real audit doesn't just grade your site in isolation. It checks the same categories against two or three real competitors and shows where you're actually ahead, where you're behind, and by how much. Without that comparison, a score is just an opinion.

Putting it together

The categories above are the difference between an audit and a glance. Technical SEO and on-page SEO get you found. Content quality and conversion elements decide what happens once someone arrives. Local signals and AI visibility determine whether you show up in the two fastest-growing ways people actually search now. Competitor benchmarking tells you whether any of it is actually working relative to who you're competing with.

If you want to see where your own site stands against these categories, the free instant check grades your AI visibility and SEO on the same page, no signup required.