How to Do an SEO Audit in Under 20 minutes

Imagine your website rankings suddenly dropping tomorrow. Would you know what to do? Here's how to run a step-by-step SEO audit in under 20 minutes to uncover as many opportunities as possible to improve your rankings and get more organic traffic, including traffic coming from AI search chat bots. So, watch till the end. Now, an SEO audit checks how well optimized your website is for search engines and lately large language models. And it usually focuses on three areas that could be treated as standalone audits. A technical audit, an on-page audit, and a content audit. Each of them build on top of each other, helping you make your website discoverable, increase organic clicks from existing content, and find content opportunities that could potentially drive more rankings. So, let's analyze bloggerjet.com, our sandbox website for various marketing experiments. We'll kick things off with a technical audit. The reason being you want to make sure your website is visible to both search engines and searchers before fixing SEO issues and finding content opportunities. And the first step in this process is to run a crawl of your website that will form the basis of your SEO audit. For this, you need a free HS web master tools account. Head over to site audit, click on your website, and hit new crawl to audit it against over 170 onpage and SEO issues. Fast forward and the side of the overview should look something like this. The health score front and center, a bunch of distribution charts left and right, and the top issues flagged for the current crawl. Now, as a beginner, fixing all technical SEO issues can be an overkill. So instead of shooting yourself in the foot, focus on the next ones I'm going to present and you'll be ahead 90% of the competition. Step two, find and diagnose indexibility issues. Indexibility issues are by far the most important critical issues. Why? Because if Google can't index your pages, it can't retrieve them from its index, hence can't rank them. No index, no rankings. Simple as that. To find such pages, go to the indexibility report on the left menu and check for no index page warnings under the issues tab. In this case, we have nine no index pages. I'm going to click on them to further investigate why that's the case. And it looks like the majority are unatategorized category pages, but we do have an outlier, the SEO category one. To further confirm this, I can go to this page, right click and choose view page source and look for the no index tag. If this no index tag was not supposed to be here, we could either remove it or edit the metatex robot to make sure it's indexed by Google. The next thing you want to look for are duplicates. Visitors of your website should only be able to access it under the secured HTTPS version or the secured top version. If it's accessible at both or at their non-secure counterparts, then you have an issue. The above variations should redirect to the main version of your website. To check for duplicates, head to the report with the same name. We're all set in this case. Another way to check for this issue is to install HS free SEO toolbar. Go to your website, then check the HTTP headers to ensure they all redirect to the same master version. For example, if we visit http/hrefs.com, it redirects to the secure version at https/hrefs.com. All right, the next thing you want to do is benchmark your website speed against core web vital scores. Core web vitals are metrics that Google uses to measure a website's user experience. They measure a page's load time, interactivity, and the visual stability of the loaded content. These are the ideal values you should aim for. If you're out of these values, your site is already losing rankings, conversions, and user engagement. To diagnose it, head over to the performance report, then scroll to the Chrome user experience performance history chart to see which pages have a poor UX or need improvement for each of those three metrics mentioned above. Most fixes revolve around optimizing large image files and removing unnecessary JavaScript. For more on this topic, head over to this article link in the description below. The last thing you want to check in a technical audit is whether your website is mobile friendly or not. And this is for a good reason. Mobile friendliness has been a Google ranking factor ever since 2019. To do this, head over to the mobile usability report in Google Search Console. It will tell you whether any URLs have errors that affect mobile usability. If you don't have access to Google Search Console, plug any page from your website into Google's mobile friendly test tool. Here's some tips to guide yourself around. Use a mobile friendly team. Compress large image files to under 1 megabyte, but don't sacrifice on image quality. And always test your website on different devices and browsers. Okay, so now that we're done with the technical audit, let's move on to the onpage audit, which is meant to increase organic clicks from your existing content. For this, you'll first need to identify your website's overall organic traffic drops. A common cause are Google algorithm updates that target specific things like content quality or link spam. The fastest way to check that would be to plug in your website's URL in HF site explorer and see whether or not your traffic drops align with them. For bloggerjet.com, the traffic from the past year was already on a declining streak, but the decline got even worse with Google's November core update. Is this insightful? Absolutely. But if you really want to take action, you need to pinpoint exactly which pages have lost traffic so you can win it back. For this, I'll head over to the top pages report in hrefs. Compare with custom date 11th November cuz that's when the Google algorithm update took place. Traffic declined and sort for the change in traffic column in descending order. And we've got over 15 pages that have lost clicks with our article on wayback machine alternatives topping the list. So let's try to win back that traffic with onpage optimization. I'll go to HF's AI content helper and paste in the target keyword followed by the article's URL. The tool will analyze multiple search intents you can optimize for. Pick one and you'll get the topical score showing you how well your content stacks up against top ranking pages for the same keyword at a subtopic level. For example, we're scoring quite low on the FAQ subtopic. We could further investigate the cause and click on ask AI to chat with AI on how to exactly enrich the subtopic to fill in the content gap. This way, we're optimizing for comprehensive topical coverage, addressing all the relevant angles that users expect to read in search results, hence boosting your chances of ranking higher. More on this and how to use AI content helper in this video. All right, the next step is to make sure we're nailing the three kings of onpage optimization: title tags, metadescriptions, and H1s. These are basic onpage elements that help Google understand your page and drive more clicks. To check for such issues, head over to site audit all issues and hit the content section. And it turns out Blogger Jet is missing meta description tags on 49 pages. Writing them all from scratch that take forever. And with Google rewriting them 63% of the time, is it even worth it? A better way is to use the batch AI feature under the patches column which will generate AI based meta descriptions in just a few clicks. From here you can either publish them manually or push them directly from hrefs. No developers needed. You'll just need the max project boost to do it. The onpage optimization audit wouldn't be complete without checking your internal links. Internal links are crucial for two reasons. First, they help users and search engine crawlers navigate your website. And second, they enable the transfer of link equity from high authority pages to low authority ones. The easiest way to improve your internal links is to use a handful of reports in Href's site audit tool. For example, to find internal linking opportunities, visit the report with the same name where you'll get pages to link from, the keyword context, and the pages to link to. Other internal links related problems involve broken internal links and orphan pages. To find broken internal links that you could reinstate or redirect, go to the page explorer report, which sums up all the crawl pages within a crawl, and click on the pages drop-down, then select not found. And to find orphan pages that you should reconnect with the rest of your website, click on the links drop-down and select orphan pages. All these use cases should help you connect relevant and supporting pages while directly impacting Google's page rank computation, which is still one of the most vital algorithms in terms of ranking your website. And we're down to the last piece of the SEO audit puzzle, the content audit. Truth be told, we did in part touch upon it when analyzing the top declining pages of a website and its internal linking profile. So, I'm going to focus on how to uncover content opportunities that you could potentially capitalize on. And the first one is about finding keywords your competitors rank for, but you don't. To surface such content gaps, go to the HR competitive analysis tool, paste your website at the top, followed by the competing domains at the bottom, and hit show keyword opportunities. And we've got over 6,000 keywords where at least one of your competitors is ranking in top 10. but Blogger Jet isn't. To narrow down the list, click on the competitor's positions dropdown to make sure more than one competitor is ranking in the top 10. From here, you can fill your content calendar for weeks to come. Okay, it's 2025 and an SEO audit wouldn't be complete without optimizing for AI overviews and feature snippets. According to our AI overview research, informationational keywords trigger an AI overview 99.2% of the time. We also found out that AI overview SERs trigger 849% more feature snippets versus nonAI overview SERs. That means that when you land an AI overview, you're a lot more likely to bag a feature snippet, too. So, if you want to be authoritative, trustworthy, and credible, heck, if you even want to be seen in 2025, then you need to optimize for AI overviews and feature snippets. To audit your current AI overviews, feature snippets presence. Just head over to HR site explorer organic keywords report. Hit the SER features filter and check the AI overview and feature snippet boxes where target does rank. We'll show you the exact AI overview position and the URLs inside it. Once you expand the AI overview under the SER overview table, to learn more on how to rank for AI overviews, check out our latest video.