What an SEO audit actually covers

An SEO audit is a systematic check of everything about a website that determines whether search engines can find it, understand it, and choose to show it. A useful audit ends with a short ordered list of things to change. An unhelpful one ends with a spreadsheet of 400 rows.

What an audit actually covers

The areas below are ordered the way they should be worked, because they fail in sequence: a page that cannot be crawled scores zero on everything downstream, however good its content. Each one carries a number from our own surveys, because "check this" is advice and "this is broken on half the sites we read" is a reason.

Crawlability and indexing — the gate

Can search engines reach the page, and are you telling them to index it? This is where the site-killing mistakes live: a noindex left on after a redesign, a robots.txt Disallow: / carried over from staging, canonicals pointing at another domain, redirect loops. Every one of these is invisible to a visitor and fatal to rankings.

Two numbers from reading the robots.txt of the Tranco top 10,000. Of the 1,616 sites writing a rule aimed at an AI crawler, 838 — 51.9% — name a user-agent token no crawler answers to, so the rule they wrote does nothing. And 643 of the 10,000 refused a self-identifying bot at the server before robots.txt was even consulted, which no amount of editing that file will fix. Both are measured here.

On-page

Titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, image alt text, internal anchor text. Mostly straightforward, but two details matter more than people expect: search engines truncate titles by pixel width rather than character count, and alt="" is the correct markup for a decorative image — not a missing alt.

Content

Whether pages answer the question someone actually asked. Thin pages, unfinished template copy left in production, unedited AI-generated copy, missing author and date signals.

Speed

Time to first byte, page weight, render-blocking resources, layout shift risk. Note the limit: Core Web Vitals are field measurements and need a real browser under real conditions. Any tool claiming to measure your LCP from a static crawl is estimating.

Structured data

Schema.org markup that tells a search engine what the page is. Most real-world business schema sits inside an @graph array, which naive validators miss entirely and then report as absent.

We read the homepage JSON-LD of 85 well-known sites: 50 declare an organisation and only 41 declare sameAs, the property that links that organisation to anything else. 9 went to the trouble of describing themselves and then connected it to nothing. The dataset is here.

The three most audits skip

• Local business signals — NAP consistency, LocalBusiness schema and its subtypes, opening hours, geo targeting. For a plumber or a restaurant this is organic search.
• AI search visibility — per-crawler access, server-side rendering, entity resolution. Explained here.
• Conversion — whether the traffic you earn has anywhere to go. The most expensive failure on any site is a page that ranks and converts nobody.

How often to run one

Quarterly is right for most sites, with lighter monitoring between. Run one immediately after a redesign, a migration, a CMS change, or an unexplained traffic drop — those are when the fatal, invisible mistakes get introduced.

What a good audit report looks like

Three tests. If a report fails them, it will not get acted on:

1. Is there a first task? Not a category — a specific first thing.
2. Does every finding say what it costs you? "Missing meta description" is a fact. "Google is writing your search snippet from a cookie notice" is a reason.
3. Does it admit what it could not check? A report with no gaps either checked nothing or is hiding something. If a crawl was blocked or only reached part of a site, that has to be on the page.

Docket is built around those three. It runs 93 checks on your Mac, ranks everything by impact against effort, and marks areas it could not assess as unknown rather than passing.

Download Docket

Common questions

What does an SEO audit include?

Crawlability and indexing, on-page markup, content quality, speed, structured data, internal and outbound links, and security. A thorough audit also covers local business signals, AI search visibility and conversion, which most technical crawlers omit.

How often should I run an SEO audit?

Quarterly for most sites, with lighter monitoring in between. Run one immediately after a redesign, migration or unexplained traffic drop — those are when invisible, fatal mistakes get introduced.