SEO Audit: 8 Essential Elements to Check on Your Website

An SEO audit should be to a website what a roadworthiness test is to a car: a way to find out what's working, what's starting to wear out and what's likely to leave you stranded by the roadside. And contrary to popular belief, it's not simply about counting your keywords or telling you your homepage "could be optimised".

A full SEO audit analyses a site's technical health, its content, structure, performance, visibility and standing against the competition. Above all, it should lead to concrete, prioritised recommendations.

Why carry out an SEO audit?

Before you can fix a problem, you first need to know it exists.

That's exactly the role of an SEO audit. It helps identify the elements that can limit a site's ability to be crawled, indexed, understood and properly ranked in search results.

Google uses many systems to crawl pages, index them and determine which results are most relevant for a given query. (developers.google.com)

The audit therefore provides a snapshot of the situation at a given moment and identifies where the main opportunities for improvement lie.

1. Technical site analysis

This is usually the first big chunk of work.

An SEO audit must check that search engines can properly access and understand the site's important pages.

This typically covers:

• page indexation;

• the robots.txt file;

• the XML sitemap;

• HTTP errors;

• redirects;

• canonical tags;

• URL structure;

• internal links;

• any duplicate content issues.

Why does this matter? Because a site can have the best copy in the world: if Google can't properly access its pages, you've written a masterpiece in a room with no door.

Google recommends, among other things, checking that important resources are accessible to crawlers and that pages intended to appear in search results can be properly indexed. (developers.google.com)

2. Site structure and architecture

A good audit should also look at how information is organised.

A site's structure affects both the user experience and how search engines understand the relationships between different pages.

A company site, for example, should have a logical architecture: a dedicated services page, sufficiently detailed pages for key services, links between related content and clear, understandable navigation.

The infamous menu with 17 sections, 46 sub-sections and an "Other" that hides everything nobody could quite categorise? We can probably do better.

3. Keywords and search intent

Next comes the central question: which searches do you want to appear for?

An SEO audit must identify the keywords relevant to the business, but also check whether existing pages genuinely answer the intent behind those searches.

For example, someone typing "website design price Geneva" isn't necessarily looking for the same thing as someone searching for "web agency Geneva".

Both queries may relate to the same business, but they correspond to different needs.

The job, then, is to match the right page with the right intent, rather than trying to rank a single page for absolutely everything.

4. Content analysis

An SEO audit should then examine the quality and relevance of the content.

This typically covers:

• the relevance of the copy;

• its depth relative to the topic;

• the presence and structure of headings;

• title and meta description tags;

• the information actually provided to the reader;

• content that's too similar or too thin;

• opportunities to create new pages.

Google recommends creating content that is helpful, reliable and designed first and foremost for users, rather than producing text purely to manipulate rankings. (developers.google.com)

Good SEO content, then, isn't the content that repeats a keyword the most often. It's the content that best answers the user's question.

5. Performance and the mobile experience

A modern SEO audit must also look at the experience offered to visitors.

Loading speed, visual stability, interactivity, smartphone adaptation: all factors that can influence a page's overall experience.

Google's Core Web Vitals measure loading, interactivity and visual stability through LCP, INP and CLS. (web.dev)

A site that takes six seconds to display its main content on mobile isn't exactly what you'd call a premium experience.

An audit therefore needs to identify performance issues and, above all, explain what needs fixing to resolve them.

6. Local SEO

For a business operating in Geneva, Lausanne, Annecy or any other specific geographic area, local SEO deserves a dedicated analysis.

The audit can check things such as the consistency of the company's information, the site's local presence, relevant geographic pages, reviews and the Google Business Profile listing.

Google states that local results are based on factors such as a business's relevance, distance and prominence. (support.google.com)

For an SME in Geneva, being visible for "web agency" is useful. Being visible for "web agency Geneva" to someone specifically searching for that service in the region can be even more valuable.

7. Links and site authority

An SEO audit should also look at what's happening outside the site.

Which other sites talk about your business? Which domains link to you? Are the links pointing to your site relevant? Are there opportunities to build your visibility with recognised sites or players in your industry?

Google explains that links act as a signal, among other things, for discovering new pages and understanding certain relationships between pieces of content. (developers.google.com)

An audit can therefore include an analysis of your link profile compared with that of your competitors.

8. Competitor analysis

This is often a particularly interesting part for businesses.

Your site doesn't rank in a vacuum. It's competing with other pages.

A meaningful SEO audit must therefore look at who currently holds the top positions for your strategic queries and try to understand why.

What content do they offer? What architecture do they use? Which queries are they visible for? Is their local presence stronger? Do they have more links or more specialised content?

The goal isn't to copy your competitor. It's to understand the playing field before stepping onto it in boots that are too small.

The most important part: turning the audit into an action plan

This is probably what distinguishes a useful audit from a simple automated report.

You might receive a document with 147 errors, 38 charts and an overall score of 62/100. Great. But what do you actually do on Monday morning?

A good audit should prioritise recommendations according to their impact and urgency.

For example:

1. Urgent: fix the issues preventing important pages from being indexed.

2. Priority: optimise strategic pages and their SEO targeting.

3. To develop: create new content or services addressing relevant searches.

4. To improve: work on performance, internal linking and domain authority.

An SEO audit shouldn't just tell you what's wrong. It should explain what to do next.

SEO audit: how much does it cost?

The price obviously depends on the size and complexity of the site. A small brochure website with a few pages doesn't require the same work as an e-commerce site with thousands of products.

At Wecode, SEO services start from CHF 999, with a scope tailored to the project's needs.

The whole point of an audit is to work out where to invest your time and budget before launching into a long series of optimisations.

At Wecode, the audit is the beginning, not the end

An SEO audit should never end its career in a folder named "SEO_final_v3_definitely_OK.pdf" that nobody will ever reopen.

Its purpose is to serve as a roadmap for gradually improving your online presence.

At Wecode, we can support businesses throughout this whole process: SEO audits, search engine optimisation, website design, web development, UX/UI design and digital communication.

The goal is simple: understand what's holding you back, fix what needs fixing, and build a site that meets your visitors' expectations as well as search engines' requirements.

Because good SEO doesn't start with a list of keywords. It starts with a solid site, a real strategy and a genuine understanding of your customers.

Why this article?

This article was written to explain to businesses what they can legitimately expect from a professional SEO audit. The aim is to go beyond the simple scores automatically generated by certain tools, and to show the various elements needed for a genuinely actionable analysis.

Information regarding how Google works, indexing, helpful content, links and Core Web Vitals has been verified against official Google Search Central and web.dev resources, to keep the approach aligned with current recommendations.

This article was written by the Wecode team with the help of artificial intelligence tools, then reviewed and approved by our experts.