Quick SEO Audit

A fast scan of the most critical SEO fundamentals. Target time: under 1 hour.

For a comprehensive audit, see the full SEO audit.

1. Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Every page should have a unique <title> and <meta name="description"> — these are what show up in Google search results. Right-click the page, choose “View Page Source”, and search for them in the <head>.

Title: should be under 60 characters, otherwise Google will cut it off
Description: should be under 160 characters and summarise what the page is about

2. Heading Hierarchy

Each page should have one h1 that clearly describes the page topic. Think of h1 as the main title, h2 as chapter headings, and h3 as sub-sections. You can check these in DevTools by inspecting the page or using the HeadingsMap extension.

3. Crawlability

Search engines use bots to discover pages. Two files control what bots can see:

robots.txt — visit example.com/robots.txt and make sure it doesn’t block important pages
sitemap.xml — visit example.com/sitemap.xml and verify it exists and lists the key pages. It should also be referenced in robots.txt

When someone shares a link on Slack, LinkedIn, or social media, the preview card is generated from Open Graph tags. Right-click → View Page Source and search for og:title, og:description, and og:image. You can test how the card looks using opengraph.xyz.

5. Canonical URLs

A canonical tag tells search engines “this is the main version of this page”. Without it, Google might treat www.example.com/about and example.com/about as duplicate pages and split their ranking.

Right-click → View Page Source and search for <link rel="canonical". Each page should have one, pointing to its own URL.

6. Broken Links and 404s

Broken links hurt both user experience and SEO. Run the site through Broken Link Checker and note any links that return a 404 (page not found) or redirect multiple times.

7. Mobile Friendliness

Open the site on a phone (or press F12 in Chrome and click the device toggle icon). Check that:

Text is readable without zooming
There is no horizontal scrolling
Buttons and links are easy to tap without hitting the wrong one

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