1 What is an SEO audit?
An SEO audit is a health check of your website — a systematic review of the technical, on-page, and off-page factors that decide how well you rank. The goal isn't a 100-page report; it's a clear, prioritised list of what's holding you back and what to fix first. This guide covers the tools I actually use and exactly how each one fits into the process.
Good news: you can run a genuinely useful audit with free tools alone. The paid suites make things faster and add competitor data, but Search Console, Analytics, Screaming Frog, and PageSpeed Insights will already surface most issues.
2 The SEO audit toolkit
Here are the core tools, what each one does, and how it earns its place in an audit.
Google's free tool showing how your site performs in Search — impressions, clicks, average position, and indexing status.
Free web analytics tracking traffic, engagement, conversions, and user behaviour across your site.
A desktop crawler that mimics Googlebot, mapping your entire site's URLs, tags, redirects, and errors. Free up to 500 URLs.
A powerful SEO suite best known for the largest backlink index, plus keyword and content tools.
An all-in-one platform for keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, and site auditing.
Google's free tool that scores page speed and reports real-world Core Web Vitals data.
Bing's free equivalent of Search Console, with its own crawl and keyword data plus a built-in site scan.
Validates whether a page's structured data is eligible for rich results.
3 How to run the audit, step by step
Work through these in order — each step feeds the next, and documenting as you go turns raw findings into an action plan.