The exact checklist we run through on every audit — technical, on-page and off-page — so you can spot the obvious issues yourself before you ever talk to an agency.
Site loads in under 2.5 seconds on mobile · robots.txt isn't blocking pages it shouldn't · XML sitemap exists and is submitted to Search Console · HTTPS is enforced sitewide · no major Core Web Vitals failures.
Every page has a unique title tag and meta description · one H1 per page matching search intent · images have descriptive alt text · internal links use descriptive anchor text, not "click here".
Top pages actually answer the query a searcher typed · no thin or duplicate content across near-identical pages · content is kept current, not abandoned after publish.
Google Business Profile is claimed, verified and complete (if local) · no obviously spammy or broken backlinks · NAP (name, address, phone) is consistent across directories.
Our Local SEO service covers exactly this, built around your own audit findings.
Quarterly is a sensible baseline for an active site; immediately after any redesign, migration or major content change, since those are when technical issues most often get introduced unnoticed.
The technical and on-page checks, yes — most are visible in "view source" or free tools. What you can't audit externally is what's happening off-page for someone else's site, like their exact link sources.
Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights cover most of it for free. Our own free audit tool runs a version of this exact checklist automatically in seconds.
A clean technical/on-page audit removes blockers, it doesn't guarantee rankings against genuinely stronger competition. At that point the gap is usually content depth or backlink authority, not the checklist items.
In our experience running this on real sites: missing or duplicate meta descriptions, and images without alt text — both easy to fix, both very commonly ignored.
That figure tracks with Google's "good" threshold for Largest Contentful Paint, one of the Core Web Vitals. Slower doesn't mean instant penalty, but it does correlate with worse rankings and worse conversion.
A page that doesn't say enough to be genuinely useful for its target search — often under 200-300 words with no real substance, or a template page with the town name swapped and nothing else changed.
Yes — if you don't write one, Google generates its own snippet from the page content, which is rarely as compelling or accurate as one you've written deliberately.
Almost every site has it by now, but it's still worth confirming it's enforced sitewide (no mixed content warnings, no HTTP pages still accessible) rather than just present on the homepage.
Google can still find it via robots.txt or by crawling, but submitting it directly speeds up discovery of new or changed pages — a five-minute task worth doing.