SEO Audit Checklist: Technical, On-Page, and Accessibility

An SEO audit checklist helps identify what's holding your site back—but traditional audits often stop at diagnosis. This checklist covers technical SEO, on-page SEO, and website accessibility, while also explaining how AI-assisted SEO audits can prioritize fixes based on real performance data.

Technical SEO Audit Checklist

Technical SEO ensures search engines can crawl, index, and understand your site. Use this technical SEO audit checklist to identify infrastructure issues:

• Crawl errors and indexability issues (check Google Search Console)
• Site speed and Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS)
• Redirects and canonical URLs configured correctly
• Internal linking structure and orphan pages
• XML sitemap submitted and up to date
• Robots.txt not blocking important pages
• HTTPS enabled across all pages
• Mobile-friendly responsive design
• Structured data / schema markup implemented
• No duplicate content issues

On-Page SEO Audit Checklist

On-page SEO focuses on optimizing individual pages for target keywords. Use this on-page SEO audit checklist to improve content relevance:

• Page titles include primary keywords and are under 60 characters
• Meta descriptions are compelling and under 160 characters
• Header structure follows logical hierarchy (H1 → H2 → H3)
• Primary keyword appears in H1 and early in content
• Content depth matches search intent
• Images have descriptive alt text
• Internal links connect related content
• No thin or duplicate pages competing for same keywords
• URLs are clean and descriptive
• Content is fresh and regularly updated

Website Accessibility Audit Checklist

Accessibility improvements help both users and search engines understand your content. Use this website accessibility audit checklist:

• Proper heading hierarchy (single H1, logical H2-H6 structure)
• Alt text for all meaningful images
• Keyboard navigation works throughout the site
• Readable contrast between text and background
• Font sizes are legible (minimum 16px for body text)
• Links have descriptive anchor text (not "click here")
• Forms have associated labels
• Skip navigation links for screen readers
• Video content has captions or transcripts
• No content requires specific sensory abilities

Manual vs AI-Assisted SEO Audits

Manual SEO audit checklists help identify issues, but AI-assisted audits go further by ranking fixes based on impact.

Tools like SEO Friend use Google Search Console data to focus on the changes that matter most. Instead of fixing every issue equally, you fix the issues affecting pages with real impressions and clicks first.