Run an on-page SEO audit in an hour: the ten checks that move rankings, from titles and headings to canonicals, alt text, internal links and speed.
A proper audit starts with data, not opinions. Crawl your site with a tool such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, pull the coverage report from Google Search Console, and export your sitemap. For a small site, one crawl covers everything; for larger sites, focus on your money pages first: services, products and the pages that generate enquiries. Work through the ten checks below in order, log every issue with the URL, and fix the problems in batches rather than one page at a time, because the fixes are mostly repetitive and fast.
First, every page needs a unique title tag of roughly 50 to 60 characters with the primary keyword near the front; duplicate or missing titles are the most common audit finding. Second, every page needs a meta description of about 140 to 160 characters written to earn the click, not just to contain keywords. Third, each page should have exactly one H1 that matches its purpose. Fourth, the heading hierarchy should be logical: H1, then H2s, then H3s, with no skipped levels. Search engines do not penalise messy headings as harshly as people claim, but clear headings improve your snippets and your readers.
Alt text should describe what the image shows for users of screen readers, and it is a small ranking opportunity; write descriptive alt text for meaningful images and leave decorative images empty. Canonical tags should be self-referencing on every page, pointing to the version you want indexed, which fixes most duplicate-content problems at a stroke. Internal links matter more than most audits admit: every important page should be linked from somewhere sensible with descriptive anchor text, and orphan pages (linked from nowhere) should either be linked or removed. Add a 301 redirect for every moved or removed URL so link equity and users are not lost. Also check that paginated or faceted URLs carry a sensible canonical or are excluded from indexing, because parameter URLs leak crawl budget fast.
Submit an XML sitemap in Search Console and make sure robots.txt is not blocking your CSS, JavaScript or images. Then check speed: run PageSpeed Insights on your five most important pages, and look at Core Web Vitals first (LCP, INP and CLS, covered in depth in our Core Web Vitals guide), then compress images, enable caching and remove render-blocking resources. Finish by re-crawling the site after your fixes, comparing the before and after counts, and setting a monthly reminder, because an audit is a snapshot, and SEO is a habit.
Speed is worth the effort: a page that takes six seconds to load on a phone will lose a measurable share of mobile visitors before it finishes, while the same page at two seconds will hold them, and Google's own research has shown that conversion drops steadily as load time climbs. Treat the speed checks as the last gate, not an afterthought, and re-run them whenever you add a new plugin, script or image-heavy page, because today's fast site is next month's slow one, and the metric you stopped watching is the one that quietly drifted.