What Is an SEO Audit and When Should You Do One

An SEO audit checks how your website performs in search. It reviews content, technical issues, and backlinks to find ranking problems. And you should run an audit whenever your traffic drops, before a site migration, or at least every few months, depending on your site size.

At Click 2 Rank, we’ve run hundreds of SEO audits for businesses across different industries. We know exactly where problems hide and how to fix them.

In this article, we’ll discuss what a search engine optimization audit includes. You’ll also learn why your site needs an SEO audit, when you should run it, and how often.

Ready? Let’s get started.

What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a complete review of your website’s ability to rank in search engines. It reviews all important areas, including title tags and backlinks. The goal here is to find what’s broken and fix it.

Most website owners assume their site is doing fine. Then they run an audit and discover dozens of issues they never knew existed. From our experience, even well-designed sites have hidden problems that drag down their SEO performance.

Here’s what a comprehensive SEO audit typically covers:

• On-Page SEO Factors: The on-page optimization factors include your meta tags, meta descriptions, headers, and internal links. The audit checks if your pages target the right keywords and flags any duplicate content spread across multiple URLs.
• Technical SEO Issues: Your site speed, Core Web Vitals, and mobile indexing are part of your technical SEO. This is where you’ll also spot crawl errors that block search engines from your key pages. Plus, you’ll identify broken links and slow pages, which hurt your site’s performance.
• Off-Page SEO: Not all search engine ranking factors are on your site, you know. There’s off-page SEO that looks at brand mentions, social signals, and your overall online reputation. Search engines use these external signals to measure how trustworthy your site really is.
• Backlinks: It’s important to know who’s linking to your website. And you can get this data with a backlink audit. It helps you see how those links affect your SEO performance. The audit also reveals gaps where competitors have links you don’t (which is a problem worth fixing).

Remember one thing: a complete audit connects the dots between technical health, content, and authority.

Why Your Website Needs an SEO Audit

Your website needs an SEO audit because many issues, like slow pages, indexing errors, duplicate content, and outdated keywords, go unnoticed. Over time, these problems build up, and eventually, your organic traffic drops without a clear reason.

We’ll take a closer look at these problems.

Uncover Hidden Technical SEO Issues

You probably don’t know this, but Google might be skipping pages on your site right now due to crawl errors, indexing issues, and redirect chains. Any of them can block search engines from reaching your entire site. And the longer they are there, the more your traffic will slip away.

Slow pages are just as bad. For example, your visitors will bounce unless your site loads up fast. Sadly, those bounce rates then pull your search results down with them (every extra second costs you visitors).

Now, Google Search Console (GSC) catches some of these issues. And from our experience, it misses a lot of problems, too. However, a proper site audit goes deeper and underscores technical SEO issues you’d never find otherwise.

Find Content Gaps Hurting Your Rankings

Are your competitors ranking for keywords you should be targeting? Over time, content loses value because search engines want fresh and up-to-date information. So, older pages slowly slide down the search results until they basically disappear.

Then there’s the content you never created in the first place. If a competitor covers a topic and you don’t, that’s traffic going straight to them. A content audit shows you exactly which target keywords you’re leaving wide open.

And if you have thin content spread across multiple URLs, that’s just diluting your authority. It’s a huge no-no. Rather, ensure that you have one strong and well-built page. It’ll perform better than several weak ones.

Pro tip: Optimize your old content for People Also Ask questions to expand reach without creating new pages.

When Should You Run an SEO Audit?

You should run an SEO audit when your traffic drops, before a site migration, or after Google updates. These moments often expose small issues that can grow quickly, and fixing them early helps prevent long-term ranking losses.

Let’s get into more detail about why you should run an audit around the mentioned times.

After Traffic Drops or Algorithm Updates

Google pushes a lot of algorithm updates every single year. Most of them are small and fly under the radar. But core updates can change rankings overnight. For instance, pages that ranked fine yesterday can suddenly drop off page one, and there’s no obvious reason why.

That’s when a comprehensive SEO audit pays off. It pinpoints exactly what changed. Was that a technical error that got exposed? Or was it content that no longer matches what Google wants to rank? Either way, you get answers to questions like those (context is always important).

And sudden traffic drops are no different. If your organic numbers fall out of nowhere, it means that something definitely broke. This is where an audit will show what went wrong so you can fix it before the damage spreads.

Before a Website Redesign or Migration

The best thing about auditing before a migration is that it catches broken links before they get to ruin your rankings. Honestly, even simple redesigns can wreck your SEO more often than people expect.

We’ve seen companies launch fresh new sites, then watch their organic traffic fall off a cliff the next week. Why? Because the redesign likely broke their internal links. Also, redirects probably point to the wrong pages, and old URLs have disappeared without a trace.

That’s why we recommended performing an SEO audit before you launch your website. Document every URL, redirect, and internal link. Then audit again after launch to catch anything that slipped through.

What’s the Right Audit Frequency for Your Site?

The right audit frequency depends on your site size and how often you publish content. Like, a small business site with ten pages doesn’t need the same schedule as a large e-commerce store. So, you just need to match your audit tempo to how fast things change on your site.

Here’s a general breakdown:

Site Type	Audit Frequency	Why
Small business or brochure sites	Every 6-12 months	Fewer pages and minimal content changes mean less can go wrong between audits.
Medium-sized sites with regular updates	Quarterly	Frequent content publishing creates more chances for technical errors and duplicate content to appear.
Large e-commerce or news sites	Monthly	High page volume, constant changes, and competitive keywords demand ongoing monitoring.
After major changes (redesign, migration, new CMS)	Immediately before and after	Catches broken links, redirect issues, and indexing problems before they damage rankings.

The table covers scheduled audits. But in certain situations, you may have to audit your site instantly. We mentioned those circumstances earlier: traffic drops, algorithm updates, and site migrations. They all fall into that category.

One more thing. Don’t confuse a full audit with quick checkups. Logging into Google Search Console weekly to scan for crawl errors is a good habit, sure. But that’s not the same as a complete SEO audit that reviews your entire site from top to bottom. You need them both.

Useful tip: Assign ownership to audit tasks, since audits without accountability rarely lead to improvements.

Start Your First SEO Audit Today

You now understand what an SEO audit includes and when to run one. On-page work, technical health, backlinks, and content gaps all affect search performance. And by auditing at the correct time, you can fix small issues before they grow even bigger.

If you haven’t audited your site in the past six months, now’s the time. Start with a free SEO checker tool to get a baseline of your site’s health. From there, you can dig deeper into specific issues or bring in an expert for a comprehensive SEO audit.

Here at Click2Rank, we offer strategic SEO audits built for businesses that want actual results. Reach out to our team to get started.